


Stranger, Take My Helping Hand

by Hannah



Series: Autumn's Advancing [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: California, Dubious Morality, Established Relationship, F/M, Old Age, Orb of Thesulah, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2020-12-14 15:28:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 62,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21018047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: Buffy's lived a very long time, and it still hasn't been long enough for the world to stop surprising her, or to have forgotten some of the lessons she learned very early on: not every choice is a good one, and not every decision is nice. But it's having the choice that's important, and what's nice isn't always what's right.Sequel toAutumn's Advancing.





	1. fall and turn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "White Winter Hymnal" as covered by Thea Gilmore.

It is not in the nature of foxes to be storytellers, though they may lie when it suits them. Rather, they share what they know to be real – real enough, as a fox sees it. Where and how to bite. What pieces to eat first. The sounds to make to warn off others from the danger they themselves are in. And if it is the case, when to cry out not with warning but with a promise. To call out to each other what creatures to follow along after, and what might well be promised to them for having followed.

Foxes are clever creatures. They are clever enough to know when they are not the swiftest or the strongest, or even the creature most capable of fully understanding the world.

What might well be promised, for some very clever foxes of a very careful place, is a rare meal always worth the chance it might come. A rich meal, a meal for days to come; soft, sweet, the gentle meat torn and gorged upon, swallowed down still warm. The creature most capable, the creature which feasted first – as is meant to be, here in this place, this creature is always to feast first – sits back from the meat, having had its fill.

A gentle feasting for this one, though no less complete; not the pieces but the blood.

A strange feasting, to the foxes; a creature feasting on those much like itself.

When the creature feasts on those not entirely like itself, its eyes shimmer and its fangs shine. When the creature sits back, to let the foxes and ravens and all manner of other hungry beasts come and take their turns, its eyes and fangs slide away until its next hunt and the next feast.

The foxes which follow along after the creature are not given to curiosity about from where it might have come. Foxes have long memories, but not long enough to carry the creature’s arrival. Foxes live in the long moment, with no great intentions for what might yet come to pass and what has since come before. As they know the world, as they see it to be real, the creature is simply what exists, much like snow and much like trees.

Sometimes the creature sings. Not as a fox might sing, though sometimes it comes close enough to fool them – a suitable lie, as a fox might see it, as a fox might sing back to be certain and unknowingly play to the lying of things. Sometimes the creature speaks, as the other ones like it speak. Never to the other ones as they speak to each other, stomping their boots and rattling their guns. This one speaks to those only it can see, to call out their joy and sorrow and pain, sounds even a fox can understand. Sometimes the creature runs, spinning through the breaks in between the trees, along the empty roads and through the ruins, a happiness from being placed in the world.

The creature is careful in its hunts, being alone. This suits the foxes. That is as fits the world, being careful when hunting alone. It is swift in its hunts. This suits the foxes as well; quickly killing for the best meals.

What does not suit the foxes is the day the creature disappears, and with it, the soft, sweet, gently eaten feasts.

But foxes lie as it suits them, and believe that one day it might yet return to them.


	2. filling these hedges with flowers unnumbered

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Red Weather" by Jack Harris.

Buffy wasn’t a thousand-brown-M&Ms-in-a-brandy-glass kind of person, but she had to admit, it was pretty nice knowing she _could_ make requests like that and they’d be seen to. Not that she would. It was just nice knowing that she could.

Her rider for speaking engagements wasn’t a huge Van Halen-level tome of precision requirements, so many ampules of such wattages every dozen feet. She wasn’t set on becoming a diva at her age. The biggest item on her list was vamp-friendly lodgings for three nights before and two days after the event itself. It made travel easier for both her and Spike, giving them the feeling of settling in somewhere. More like the long business trips she’d always imagined having back when she was a kid and less like she was on a rapid-fire slaying mission like those she’d done for a few decades. She and Spike could get in without a hurry, get some rest, prepare a little, and afterwards, have some time to themselves before heading back home.

Deciding which engagements to agree to these days was as much a question of where they’d be going as the event itself.

“Look, we can do Sacramento and the car museum anytime,” Buffy explained, dicing the garlic with a little flourish to the knife. “All I’m saying is it’s nice to see the Bay Area on an invitation.”

“Tourist kitsch, the whole lot of it,” Spike grumbled. “There still a man at the Haight-Ashbury corner that charges tourists to make him move so they can snap a picture of the sign? Or is it a lady nowadays?”

“Yes, yes, Mister I Was There A Century Ago And Drugs Were Better Then.”

“I was on the_ East_ Coast, thank you, and I wasn’t even stoned for most of it.” He leaned back against the kitchen counter. “So, what’s it this time? Speech?”

“Yeah. Graduating class of 2069. It’ll be me, a Pulitzer novelist I keep meaning to read, and a former US Ambassador to France.” She slid the garlic off the knife into the pan and began stirring gently.

“Nice get.”

“I’m glad you think so.” She sighed. “I really should just go pick up one of her books. I mean, if I’m meeting her, I figure I should have some idea what she’s done.”

“Your book tour’s still on for next year?”

“It’s not really_ my _book since –” He threw her a low sound and a look decrying her modesty in her accomplishments. “Yeah, it starts in January. Don’t worry, the League’s got that covered. But I’m thinking I’ll make an appearance for San Francisco. And maybe Berkeley, if there’s a stop there and the university’s nice about this one.”

“Ah, so it’s not just you liking the city itself, it’s you wanting the bigwigs to wine and dine you.”

“There’s a certain charm to people trying to make sure you have a good time.”

“As though that’s not what always happens when the great and beautiful Buffy Summers comes to town.”

“You be quiet and let me have my fantasy.” He laughed and took a swig of wine before Buffy grabbed the bottle and added a good splash of it to the pan. “You do know what me giving a speech means,” Buffy said, trying to get back to a serious tone.

“I do, love. So long as you let me know when they’re coming.”

Tossing off a rousing speech to a squadron of warriors and mystics before going into battle was one thing, and she could still do that without a whole lot of stumbling around her words. Those circumstances tended to narrow the focus enough it was easy to know what needed to be said. Standing up in front of a large auditorium and delivering a predetermined set of words was another black kettle of beasts altogether. 

UC Berkeley had helpfully suggested a few topics, and she’d gotten a few ideas down by the time Samina and Alenka came over four days later. As per usual when Buffy wasn’t the only Slayer in the house, Spike kept his distance – respectful, certainly. Cautious, that too. Wary, even, in the right light. It might be his house, but they were still Slayers and he was still a vampire. Some things weren’t ever going to change. He’d driven off before they even rang the doorbell, although not before he’d made a pot of tea and set out snacks as a truce offering.

“Responsibility isn’t necessarily cliché,” Alenka said around a mouthful of finger sandwich. She was forty-nine, held down a day job in Burlingame as a mortgage officer, and spent her weekends volunteering for the local US forest service clearing hiking paths in the mountains. “Collective responsibility, that’s something you can really tease out for at least eight minutes. Or the other one you had, about understanding your needs? The idea you had on asking for help had a solid start.”

“You’re here now, aren’t you? I could talk about you two helping me write the speech.” 

“You’d be veering a little too close to postmodern.” 

“I know,” Buffy sighed. “Maybe keeping fear your friend?”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Samina leaned back and threw an arm over the back of the sofa. She was sixty-two, dyed her shoulder-length gray hair like an oil slick, and had worked as the local League manager for the past thirty-five years. “I think my commencement speaker was…I think something about dialogue and open discussion. But someone being open about fear, especially someone like you, would carry a lot of power.”

“As long as it sounds fresh. Fear’s not a_ bad_ thing. It’s something that you need to make friends with. If it goes away, that’s not always good.” Buffy paused to consider. “Almost never, really.”

“I think we’ve got it,” Samina grinned.

“Okay! Fear. And your experiences therewith.” Buffy nodded. “Not your greatests or your worsts, but your experiences. Inviting it in without letting it take over.”

“There’s definitely at least eight minutes’ worth of subject material right there.” Alenka flipped to a fresh sheet on her notepad. “Now, to begin, what do you mean by _making friends with it?”_

“You got a while? That’s what this’ll take.” A while, and then some. Spike didn’t come inside until well past midnight, when he was certain Samina and Alenka were asleep. Knowing him, he’d probably listened to their breathing through an open window. Buffy waited up to greet him when he came slinking into their bedroom, curling up under the covers and wrapping her arms around him.

“How long’s it they’re gonna be staying?”

“Day after tomorrow.” She kissed him. “After that it’s just emails and phone calls unless something _really_ big comes up.”

“Get it right the first time,” he retorted, kissing her back.

It wasn’t a big enough house he could avoid them entirely. The best he could do without predetermined scheduling and coordination was_ mostly _avoid them, sticking to his solarium during the day and heading off at night. There weren’t any drawing sessions scheduled that night, though he went off anyway.

“Where’s he headed?” Alenka asked. The three of them had spent the afternoon out around downtown, going over the concepts of courageousness and perseverance in a new setting with more caffeine options, and came home in time for Spike to pointedly not say goodnight before leaving.

Buffy shrugged. “Santa Rosa, maybe. They’ve got a couple demon bars there.” 

From the touch of alcohol on his breath and the echo of smoke in his hair when he finally got home, he’d hit up all three of them. “You saw how they looked at me?” Spike growled in her ear. “Guess a soul doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

“It goes plenty far.” Buffy pulled him closer. “They’ll be gone tomorrow. You can even sleep through it if you want.”

He didn’t, opting instead to keep lurking in his solarium through the morning. It was exactly the sort of pointed lurking he’d perfected decades ago. The kind that said he wasn’t just standing around, he was letting them know he was paying attention and waiting for them to make their move first. He at least had the manners to say goodbye to them – from across the room, in a tone that said he was doing it under protest.

“That went well,” Buffy remarked after they’d gone. “Another month and I’ll have something worth editing.”

“Glad you got so much out of it,” he said, voice clipped and tight. She let it slide. Right now, it wouldn’t be worth the effort it took to be petty. She was more interested in keeping her mind on the necessary preparations and making sure she could say everything she needed in under ten minutes while staying fresh and engaging. She could easily regale the crowd with another set of anecdotes about her more dangerous adventures, but she suspected it’d be better to save those last few she had in reserve for the book tour.

Meanwhile, Spike’s own trip preparations were a well-practiced routine, the most elaborate part of which was writing up extra instructions for Izzy regarding the indoor plants. Everything else was done below the radar. No phone calls, no posts to message boards, not even a group text. Most of what he did, she didn’t see. She didn’t even lurk around and watch from the sidelines. All she knew was he headed out to the town’s small nest and asked a few questions, and the rest of the vamps took it from there.

The way Spike had explained it to her, ages ago, was that was easier for them this way. Safer, also. Stay beneath notice by not leaving any sort of trail. Keep below the radar of anyone who might be paying attention by moving carefully and sticking to the community. Word spread_ fast_ through the nests, fast enough to keep pace with playground rumor and high school gossip. Someone showed up at their house five days after he’d gone out to talk.

She didn’t need her hearing aids to know the vampire was approaching; she’d just felt their presence, the skin along her arms shivering and rising. Spike was already outside by the time she got to the front yard. He was standing on the front step, barefoot, watching the other vampire standing on the little patch of lawn, a respectful distance from the house. Her bike was waiting for her just at the edge of the road.

“You’re met with grace,” Spike intoned.

“You’re met in kind,” she replied. She was about Spike’s height, with light brown hair, jeans and a t-shirt. Something about the way she made Buffy’s skin shiver felt familiar, even though she couldn’t recognize the vampire’s face. “I was…” She didn’t finish, peering around Spike to look at Buffy.

Spike didn’t turn around. “Buffy, this is Rowan. She’s –”

“We’ve met,” Buffy said. Maybe a bit more curtly than she wanted it come out, but she’d rather be curt than see a curtsy. “You don’t need to bow or anything,” she went on, just to be safe. “You’ve still got my blessing.”

“Yes. Right.” Rowan stayed where she stood. “Of course.”

“So tell me, what’ve you heard?” Spike asked.

Rowan nodded. “There’s not any news like you asked for. I’ve heard nothing. There’s been talk on the Oakland side of a split, if Kehati’s gang can find themselves a suitable new place. There’s been no word from Gerhard and there’s going to be a new nest down the peninsula once the harvest season picks back up. There’s nothing of note out of Berkeley, but they’ll be glad to have you, should you come.”

“Any nest worth mentioning’d be happy to have me. You went down to ask them that yourself?”

“Bandit came up from Santa Cruz.” She pulled her shoulders back. “He came up looking for Jamal.”

“He’s gone missing like Gerhard?”

“No. Bandit found Jamal and they had words, and Bandit’s moved on again. He’s the one who told me about it.”

“You didn’t come here just to share gossip about a breakup.”

“If a breakup’s all the news I’ve heard, that’s all the news I’ll give. I’m sorry there’s nothing more substantial.”

Spike nodded, almost satisfied. “Thank you. Mind if I drop in sometime?”

“As you said, any nest worth mentioning.” She finally smiled.

“As I did. Very much appreciate you coming to call. The Slayer’s happy, too.”

“She is?” Rowan blinked.

“Of course I am,” Buffy said. Rowan’s eyes went wide, and she stood her ground.

“It’s very kind of you to say. Slayer, Spike. Good night to you both.” She nodded at them, went off to her bike, and pedaled back to town.


	3. thinking of the roar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "California" by Phantom Planet.

Much as she didn’t want to admit it, Buffy honestly enjoyed packing. She’d done enough to get it down to a science and could throw a suitcase together for just about any contingency without even thinking. The thinking came when she wanted to, and right now, she was ready for it.

And it was – travel insurance, really. Making sure she was prepared, hoping she wouldn’t _need_ it, and having it anyway because unpacking some things that’d gone unused was a nice feeling. So, nestled in with the socks were a couple vials of holy water. Along with her carefully selected jewelry that Spike’d helped her pick out, there was a tasteful emergency silver cross. A sachet of herbs from the backyard that, when lit on fire, could stink-bomb out demons and leave humans alone that doubled to keep her shirts smelling fresh. The Scythe was staying at home, but she wasn’t going anywhere without some knives and at least one throwing axe. There might be détente, and she wasn’t saying it wasn’t a good thing; she was just being prudent. It paid to pack a couple extra pairs of underwear and spare socks. The adjustable ultrasonic whistle for incapacitating any number of demons and shapeshifters was just another part of the peace-time arsenal.

The most effort Spike put into packing was folding up a suit.

It was about an hour and a half’s drive, two with rest stops. Two and a half, with rest stops and traffic. Spike’s music playing with the windows rolled down wasn’t a bad way to spend an evening. Early May breezes were coming through the hills, warm and gentle. She leaned her elbow out the window and tilted her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes to take in the smells of grass and dust and the last of the day’s heat coming off the road. California in a nutshell. Or a nose-full, as the case might be.

They’d decided on the long route, around the Bay instead of over, and weren’t far past Cotati when Buffy felt herself relaxing. Something about the movement of a big vehicle was always nice, with Spike’s preference for Don’t-Fuck-With-Me American cars being great for delivering that. The movement, and feeling secure in what was coming: she’d practiced her speech for the last two weeks and was ready to shift her concerns from its content to her delivery.

City streets gave way to small roads. Small roads gave way to bigger ones, then to highways, more city streets, and back to small roads. Vineyards, orchards, open pastures with strands of trees shaking their long leaves in the wind.

“Hey, what’d the Australian trees say to the Italian gardener?”

“Do I want to know?” Spike asked.

“They said eyyy, you clipped us.” He didn’t respond. She rolled her head over to look at him and grinned. “You clipped us? Eucalyptus?”

“I’m this close to driving us into that ditch over there,” he deadpanned.

Buffy laughed and went back to watching the scenery glide by. There were always a few flashes of water she tried to catch before they got out to the actual full-on view of the wetlands and the Bay. She didn’t see them much these days, and they were always beautiful this time of night: seemingly soft, always moving, the lights from the cars and far-off beacons bringing out each ripple on the surface.

They slid through Richmond, the whole East Bay sprawl crawl screwball city brawl – each urban center feeding into the next without any boundaries in between them. All those twentieth century sci-fi writers had gotten the whole megalopolis idea right; it was just that almost none of them had ever gotten the placement correct. “And this is why we need zoning regulations,” she groused as they made the turn for Berkeley.

“That’ll be progress, love,” he said. She knew he missed the_ good_ stink of old car engines, what with almost everything on the road these days being electric. No more of the solid sounds and smell of industry. “Can’t fight off the inevitable. Stop it before it starts, sure, if you know what you’re doing, but who’s got that much forethought these days?”

“People who’ve seen enough.”

“Fair point.”

Berkeley itself didn’t come with any big announcements. A couple of signs didn’t count. It mostly came with a shift in the size of the buildings and the shapes of the people; a more even ratio between the human and demon populations. Some places were better at that than others.

The university had put them up in one of the city’s nicest hotels. They had a suite that was almost an apartment, with a little kitchen and a separate living room. It was also about Buffy’s bedtime when they got checked in and unpacked the car, though Spike was ready to head out for a while. He always checked out the local nests to see what was happening in the region. Usually he came back the next morning all full of bubbly news and gossip, so-and-so moved out of their old nest to live with their new girlfriend or this other vampire’s starting to make trouble in the local demon community but the vamps are going to sort out their own. That kind of stuff.

She woke up relaxed, refreshed, and to Spike pacing the room.

“How’d last night go?”

“The nest’s gone.”

“Uh-huh.” She yawned the painful early morning yawn of caffeine neediness. Spike had stopped pacing and that cut through the morning fog. Because Spike didn’t go still. “Hang on, they’re what?”

“Went t’check out the one near People’s Park. Hear what’s happening right from the source. So I get there, and it’s bloody_ gone_. All the soddin’ vamps. Just gone. The building’s still there, only there’s not a single soddin’ vamp around. Went inside to see – and there’s no dust. Not a damn thing to say it’s some territory squabble. No clues. No smells. It’s like they just up and left.” His hands were almost flapping in the air around his face. None of this was ordinary for Spike and all of it was bad. “Ran all the way back. No word if they moved to the Northside nest. Best call over there.” He ran a hand down over his face, then looked steadily at her. “They took their rats. Not a good –”

“Gone?” She threw off the covers to go to him.

He started pacing again. “Could be that it happened that fast. Could be nothing big._ Could_ just be they’ve all gone…” He shook his head. “Didn’t hear a bloody thing. Not even a hint of a rumor. Either no one’s saw fit to tell me or no one saw it coming. Don’t know which is worse.”

“Whichever way it is, I can’t help you without something – oh, thanks.” He handed her a cup of tea that, for hotel-stocked options, was pretty good. Two sips in and she was feeling more herself. “So do you need a plan of attack on this, or…”

He had his hands wrapped around his own mug of fresh-spun haema. Also on her rider: in-room dining options for Spike. “Gonna make a few calls, see if it’s just me being out of the loop. That’s another problem, but least it’s easy enough to fix.” A nasty smile tugged at his mouth. “Might just need to remind everyone who’s doing the asking here.”

“Which shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Not hard at all.” Spike downed the mug, chugging the machine-spun blood, then flopped down into a chair. He didn’t speak, staring at the wall, and Buffy watched all his worries and fears pass over his face until he said very quietly, “Didn’t smell like they’d been dusted. Everything was there except the vampires. Just gone. Them and their rats.” He sighed deep and long and trying not to be worried. “And who the hell’s gonna worry about a few vamps leaving? Who’s keepin’ track of them?”

“Whoever counted on them for whatever valuable jobs they were doing in the community.” He jerked his head around to glare at her. “No, I’m not making light of this, don’t make that face at me. What I’m saying,” she took a sip of tea to steady herself, and thank goodness he’d stopped for milk on his way back, “I’m saying that this isn’t necessarily a panic situation. A concern situation, yes. They’re not where you thought they’d be. You don’t know where they are. So, concern. Panic, not yet. Take stock and assess and see what’s happening. Make those phone calls like you said. The other nests in town – they’re going to have people around. You call them. I’m meeting with a few people from the local League for lunch today, I can ask them if they know anything.”


	4. we'll stay busy dreaming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Very Busy People" by The Limousines.

Nobody from the League knew anything.

“They were all there last week.” Lani shrugged. “I’d like to think if anything genuinely worrying had happened to them, I’d have heard something about it by now.” She was twenty-three, with buzzcut hair dyed hot pink, and working to wash out her voice’s round Midwestern vowels with the Bay Area’s whole flatness.

“Wouldn’t that be nice.” Buffy sipped her bubble tea. Metal straw, ceramic mug – all the better to keep it cool while waiting for her meal. “I know sometimes it’s no news is good news, but this is _weird_ news. If vampire rapture was a thing, this would be evidence for it.”

Felicity leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “Didn’t you say they took the rats?” She had her hair in bantu knots and wore the sort of jewelry once only seen on middle-aged mothers that somehow, in the last couple decades when Buffy hadn’t been paying attention, had become the look of the hour for the early thirties set.

“Yeah. All the cages, all the food, the whole set-up.”

“Then it could just be that this nest decided they’d like a clean start somewhere else and didn’t want to bother with the work it’d take to get a new breeding colony off the ground.” Felicity leaned back, shaking her wrist to resettle her bracelet. 

“I’m at as much of a loss as you are,” Samina said. “We keep an eye on the nests, of course, and if there’s any territorial disputes or other sort of trouble we’re generally alerted to it before it becomes a problem for any bystanders. Of any species. This kind of disappearance…I think it may genuinely be unheard of.”

“Nesting behavior isn’t exactly well documented,” Perry offered. Soft-faced, with hair almost as curly as Spike’s, he was a crack shot with every firearm and projectile weapon he’d ever handled. “That they do it, yes. That they’ll settle in and integrate into the community? Sixty years ago, it _was_ unheard of.” Sixty years ago had barely been before his time: Sixty-two, retired from active field missions for the last nine, he was back to the time-honored Watcher duty of watching from the sidelines and offering words of encouragement. “Maybe this is completely normal nesting behavior – up and leaving because it’s time to move on – and we don’t know because we never thought to ask.”

“Doubtful,” Samina placated. “But possible.”

“You’d have to find a vampire who had nested, who’s been around a while, is willing to be interviewed _and_ trust the League with this very sensitive information they’d probably keep to themselves.” He shrugged. “Good luck finding one of those. Did Spike tell you anything?”

Buff shook her head. “He was surprised by this. I don’t think he’s heard of it either, and he’s…well. Spike.”

“That’s true,” Felicity agreed. “In that case, who knows? Right now, vampire rapture is as likely as anything else.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Lani. “For most vampires, it’d be the opposite of rapture.”

“Is there a word for getting bodily dragged into Hell?” Buffy asked. “Because it’s a word I definitely could’ve used a few times. Oh, hey, lunchtime.” Sebastopol might be a town of genuine character and charm, and she and Spike might have a lot of fun in the kitchen, but there were some things beyond both her town and her kitchen. A well-layered bowl of phở was one such thing. It put worries out of her mind for the time it took to eat, and she couldn’t ask much more than that from a bowl of soup.

When they started their desserts, Buffy eagerly dug into her banana pudding and only half-listened to Perry tell a joke involving an octopus and a spear gun – the punchline of which she lost the second the hairs on the back of her arms stood up. She and the other three Slayers all whipped their heads up and looked around while Perry was struck silence.

“There it is.” Felicity pointed over Buffy’s shoulder. She turned around to peer through the slatted fence surrounding the patio. “It’s not – oh. Sorry, Buffy. _They’re_ not even trying to hide.”

“At least they’re not coming over to bow at us,” Buffy sighed. The vampire in the daysuit was standing in plain sight, making no effort to hide or get out of anyone’s way. _Look at me, you can’t miss me, I’m standing right here watching you watch me._

“They _bow?”_ Perry asked.

“Sometimes,” Lani muttered.

“Usually,” Buffy grumbled.

“Well, to_ you_, sure,” Perry teased gently. “Us ordinary humans, not so much.”

“You’re not missing anything.” The vampire stayed there for the rest of their meal, only walking off when the check came. Maybe they didn’t want to bear witness to the time-honored Slayer ritual of arm-wrestling for the right to pay the bill. 

“It was great to see all of you,” Buffy told them, massaging her sore victory hand. They made to split to go their separate ways, except Samina lingered on, dawdling to spend a moment alone with her.

“Listen, Buffy…” Samina sighed. “You’ll need to hear this, and I’d rather you did from someone you know instead of finding out by surprise. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but believe me, I only just found it out myself.”

“You’re right,” Buffy told her after she’d gotten the news. “I’m glad I learned that from someone I knew.”

After a meal like that, she’d usually saunter around to wherever she was going. Given the news, she found herself trudging before she stopped and readjusted to a stroll. It was good to know, good to be braced, and frankly, if she hadn’t agreed to the invitation, she’d probably never have found out about this. They weren’t exactly ships passing in the night, except these days, they were closer to that idiom than anything else she could think of. She’d wanted to make it to the campus and see the gardens. Instead, she turned just at the foot of the hill, heading for the museum. Which she might’ve done anyway at some point. She liked museums.

She took in everything the museum had, just to make a point to herself. Then she lingered in the special exhibition gallery for a while, taking in his commitment to learning a new medium, vaguely reassured he was only one of a solid dozen artists in the show – half of them local, all of them notable in their own ways. Maybe the other eleven weren’t on his level of notoriety, and that was fine. She hadn’t met a lot of people that could match Angel for that. Match him for solid painting technique, though? That they could do.

Which was the point of the exhibition and the whole reason it was here. An ongoing discussion about rehabilitation and art as ways and means for people to express themselves. She didn’t look too closely at the individual placards. Even with her glasses on, the text was tiny enough she’d had to get up close and squint. On her way out, she scribbled out a note in the comment book for the need for large-print placards and went to head back to the hotel. Except she nearly bumped into the artist of the hour on her way out, his arms full of a box of paper that he very nearly came close to dropping.

“Oh!” She stepped back. She’d just assumed the Slayer alarm was a vampire working in the back offices somewhere. Which, from the box Angel was carrying, he probably had been. “Sorry about that.”

“No, no, it’s fine, nobody got hurt. There’s…” Angel looked like he couldn’t decide whether to sprint out of the room or melt into the floor. He settled on a blank, “Hi, Buffy.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“It’s nice to see you,” he offered.

“You too.” She nodded, looked around the lobby, and back at his face. Still that same old handsome face. “Your hair looks good.” Honestly, it did: slicking it down instead of gelling it up was a good look for him. Very twentieth-century movie star.

“Thanks. I’ve got a new barber.”

“Well, they’re doing a good job.”

“I’ll tell him next time I see him.” He hefted the box in his arms. At least he had something for his hands to do. She just had her bag to fiddle with. 

“I liked your landscapes,” she said.

“You did?”

“Yes. The way you did the moonlight on the trees was nice.”

“Thank you. Oil’s a new medium for me, I’m still figuring out how to get it to work, but…thank you.” He didn’t exactly smile. The corners of his eyes went soft instead. “It means a lot to hear you liked it.” He hefted the box again. “Is this the part of the conversation where I offer you some coffee so you can turn me down and leave politely?”

“I think it’s the part of the conversation where I say I’ll take some tea if you’ve got it and leave if you don’t.”

“We’ve got tea. We’ve got at least four different kinds.”

“Then I’ll see what you’ve got without making any commitment to drink it.”

She followed him past the red-letter Staff Only sign, where he dropped the papers off, making Linda in the back offices so happy about not having had to get up from her desk she kept clicking her mandibles and didn’t mind Buffy tagging along to the little galley. Once there, he filled and plugged in the electric kettle, then handed her the box of teabags. At least four was right: she remembered Mom’s galley and how the extra miscellaneous teabags all migrated into a single box just like the one she had in her hands. It was closer to at least ten. She flipped through the little squares, and finally pulled one out from near the back of the box. “I’ll take this one.”

“Jasmine?” Angel asked, almost concerned.

“Yeah. Why? Something wrong with it?”

“Nothing. No reason. It’s just – it’s a strong scent. That’s all.” He pointed. “Mugs are over there.”

Buffy opened the cupboard and smiled: the world had changed beyond the telling of it, but art galleries big and small all over the world still had boxes of mismatched teabags and cupboards full of a hodge-podge of mugs. She picked the one that looked most like a teacup, with flowers around the sides and up the delicate handle, and a tiny blue ring around the rim. Angel poured the nearly-boiling water and she understood what he meant by it being a strong scent. If it was this big a smell for her, it’d be filling the whole building for him.

“Thank you,” she murmured, dipping the bag up and down. She almost wanted to say Spike didn’t much like jasmine green tea, either, but held back. He poured himself a cup of haema from a thermos in the fridge, and joined her at the table. 

“Why are you here? I mean,” he shook his head, “What business brought you to Berkeley?”

“I’m giving a speech at graduation.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” She hesitated a moment. “If there’s room in the auditorium I’m sure you could come hear it.”

“Maybe I could,” he said. “I don’t have much planned this week. We had the big reception this Monday, so. My nights are free.”

“How’d that go?”

“Pretty well.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It’s a good show. You should be proud.”

“Working on it,” he smiled. And like every time she saw that smile, she found herself smiling back

Buffy set the teabag down on a little plate and took a sip. For a back-of-the-box bag, it made a pretty decent cup. “So you’re in town just for the show?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, there’s something I do need to ask you. I know you haven’t been here that long – a week?”

“About ten days now.”

“Have you seen any of the nests? Talked to any other vampires in town?”

“I –” He paused, then considered, and took a long sip of his haema. “You know, I did, when I got in. I spent two nights in the one in Southwest Berkeley, down on Addison and Sixth, before I got a hotel room. I wanted to get back in touch with them, except when I called to invite them to the reception, nobody was there. I figured I got them at a bad time, only they didn’t pick up the next time I called, either. I didn’t…did something happen?”

“I don’t know yet.” She took another sip. “I hope not, and that’s all I can say. If you hear anything –”

“I hear anything, I give the League a call and they’ll call you.”

“I was going to say, you can call me, but that works too.” 

She sipped her tea, he drank his haema, and they didn’t have much more to say to each other. Which was fine. He told her about the other artists in the show that he’d met and gave her a personal guided tour. She told him about the plans to open a new League center in Lagos and expand the medical clinics in San Francisco and Singapore. They said their good-byes while keeping sufficient personal space between them, he went back to work, and she walked out into the afternoon sunshine.

She took the streets slowly, window-shopping and people-watching her way back to the hotel. The last time she’d been to Berkeley it was in the middle of winter, right around the usual semester break. It hadn’t been an_ empty_ city, by no means, but there’d been a lot fewer students around, which significantly lowered the average pedestrian’s age. She moved through the crowds, along the sidewalks, enjoying the sight of everyone mingling together. Men and women of all shapes and species – guys holding hands, demons hanging out, enough of everybody that nobody was particularly remarkable. Not even her. Just lots of people out enjoying the sunshine.

She canvassed the stores as she went along, trying to see what’d linger on in her mind to be worth it to come back and buy later. She went ahead and splurged on a dress she could wear for dinner parties, something sea-green that she knew would set off her eyes and have Spike working over internal rhymes for days to come. With the morning on her mind, she stepped into Moe’s and bought him a fresh notebook and a thirdhand copy of_ Barroom Brawling Your Way Across Europe_ to cheer him up. They didn’t work, though not for her lack of trying. He hadn’t made any progress on finding what’d happened to the People’s Park nest, and the rest weren’t anywhere, either. No one had answered the phone from Martinez to Fremont, the whole length of the sprawling East Bay megalopolis.

“Tried callin’ a couple local contacts. No one’s heard a sodding thing.” His voice was tight, and he wasn’t meeting her eyes. “Not a good sign.”

_Don’t bring up Angel, don’t bring up Angel._ “Do you think they’re –”

“If it was big enough for ’em to _hear_ it, at least it’d give me a place to start looking. This doesn’t even get me that.” He flopped down on the couch next to her, staring up at the ceiling, and put in the effort to huff out an angry breath. “I’ll head out tonight, look around, see if I can’t crack a few heads to get a little something.” He shook his head and jumped back up, pacing the room, hands flying. “The whole blasted mess doesn’t fit together. Who’d want to go after vamps and _not_ dust the whole lot? That I can figure. Might not like it, but I can_ figure_ it. Whatever this is – what’s the bloody point? You can’t eat us, you can’t use us for anything, only thing anyone’d be able to use this many vamps for –”

“Spike, if someone was trying to perform a Sarpadian Reclamation, we’d have heard about it by now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Can’t move that much obsidian without landing yourself on some government watchlist.”

“So at least it’s probably not that.”

“Hardly a comforting thought.” 

“Look, I saw a couple of vampires out today.” Which was technically true. “I know that doesn’t mean much, but it’s _something._ And anyway, Perry’s going to look into it and get back to us, Samina’s going to help him dig around. Maybe they’ll come up with something.”

“Right, that’s gonna help.” He laughed. Not happily, which didn’t help Buffy’s mood; he could’ve at least given the League the benefit of the doubt. “Pet, if there was something like this, I’d have heard of it. Trust me. Never one for nesting, but there’s stuff you learn. Things you hear. I’ve never heard of this –”

“And because _you’ve_ never heard of it, it’s never happened before, ever, in the whole long and gory history of vampires?”

“Fine,” he growled. “I’ll wait and see what they dig up.”

“Thank you.”

“Still heading out tonight.”

“If that’s what you need to do to feel better.”

“It is.” He looked away and ran a hand through his curls. It never failed to astonish her just how much they moved under his fingers. She was about to offer something soothing and encouraging when he snapped his head up and said, “You want to go out for dinner? Could stay in and cook up something simple, or we could head out someplace, really enjoy ourselves.”

“Maybe,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it, but if you want, we’ll have dinner out.” She’d been kind of hoping for an evening in, make a quick grocery run to throw something together and then practice her speech again. But Spike’d been cooped up all day with nothing but bad news. So dinner out it was.

Not right away, though, with a couple hours left until sunset, they had time to waste, which they spent getting ready. It meant being right about his reaction to the sea-green dress, and him doing her hair in a four-braids-into-one piece while she sat and read her speech aloud to herself alone in the mirror one more time. It meant her helping him put on his face while he sat with his eyes closed for better ease of eyeliner application, and him inspecting her handiwork with the help of his phone.

“You have a place in mind?” She asked as he took a selfie. “Or did you want to go wherever our feet take us?”

“Yeah, I did.” He’d read about a fairly new mod-Cal restaurant that didn’t cook anything from more than a hundred and fifty miles away from the kitchen, up to and including the salt. It didn’t take reservations, which meant a ten-minute wait to be seated. Ten fairly pleasant minutes of sipping a cocktail at the bar and deliberately not looking at the giant mirror hung up on the far wall. It was way too weird to glance at herself at what was essentially _through _Spike, but still having to look around him to see her reflection. Practical metaphysics always gave her a headache.

When it came time to order, they listened to their waitress Anjali deliver the day’s specials – a fish, a meat, two vegetarian dishes – and Buffy was about to ask for her to repeat that fish one again when Spike asked, “And for those of a more sanguine persuasion?”

“Tonight it’s rabbit,” she answered without any squeamishness. Just a brief pause right before she opened her mouth, the sort that said,_ I’m fine with vampires so long as they don’t actively remind me they exist. _“Humanely raised, ethically butchered.”

“Sounds delightful. I’ll take an order of that, if you please.”

“Of course.” 

“And could you do me the favor of having it killed out here at the table?”

“I’m sorry, could we what?” 

“Just so’s it’s at peak flavor.” Delight flittered over Spike’s face. Just for a moment. A chance for a bit of wicked glee at someone else’s expense didn’t come to him much these days, which was the only reason Buffy didn’t kick him under the table.

“I’d, um.” To Anjali’s credit, she recovered fast, diving behind professionalism and putting on her Problem Customer voice. “I’m afraid that under California state sanitary regulations, we’re not able to accommodate such a request. But I assure you, all sanguine meals are butchered to order.” 

“All right. That’s fair, can’t argue with it. You know they’ll do that in Seattle, yeah?”

“Then I’m very happy for everyone in Seattle.”

“I’ll start with the beet carpaccio and then have the mushroom-fava risotto,” Buffy cut in.

Anjali collected their menus, smiled again, and slipped away. Spike raised an eyebrow at her.

“What? You get blood, I get vegetarian, it evens out.” She got a snort of laughter in response and took that as a win.

It was, honestly, a delicious dinner. Buffy’s solid food came out plated neat and pretty, and Spike’s pint of blood was served in an elegant ceramic bowl that he used both hands to pick up. He drank it gracefully, almost delicately, in as civilized a method of blood-drinking as was possible. People still watched. Maybe not overtly, although there were side-eye glances from across the room. More than a couple not-so-discreet bathroom trips so people could get a decent look at the civilized vampire. Buffy knew Spike knew what everyone else was doing, and she knew that was why he was making a point to have blood tonight when he could’ve ordered something fatty-salty-spicy and had a cup of haema in their hotel room later. There were all sorts of ways to be watched, and Spike was putting on a little performance. Making a point of _being_ watched, since everyone knew what was happening. _Yes, I’m a vampire, what’s it to you?_

After dessert, they took a long walk, swinging around through a little park and holding hands. More performance, though at least she got something out of it this time. His hand in hers, still warm from having wrapped it around his after-dinner coffee – full caffeine to her decaf, the bastard – with strong, gentle fingers now wrapped around her own. Not so many glances; definitely a few glimpses.

Maybe everyone knew who they were. Maybe they knew _what_ they were without the who.

Maybe they just thought it was weird a seemingly young man was with a woman of such age.

_Let them wonder,_ she thought, and put a little swing in her step.


	5. bite your mother tongue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Soft and Warm" by Voxtrot.

Buffy woke up the next morning five minutes before her alarm, ready and eager to start the day, and alone. Not an unprecedented event or occurrence, except Spike wasn’t in the kitchenette cooking breakfast or in the bathroom taking a shower. There wasn’t a note on hotel stationary and there weren’t any missed calls or texts. Just his absence.

It wasn’t like him to not have called, though it wasn’t something that’d never happened before. Merely unusual. She dialed his cell and got his voicemail – again, unusual, but not quite a worry – and after she left him a message, sent him a text to cover her bases.

She scrambled herself a couple of eggs and made a mug of tea to go with the rest of her breakfast. Her twice-a-week yoga routine became a way to keep herself from compulsively checking her phone. If he called, he called. If he didn’t, or more accurately, when he _hadn’t_ – even after she’d showered and gotten dressed – then it was time to get concerned. The most recent message was still from ten-sixteen last night, letting her know he was heading into one of the local demon bars. Best-case scenario, his phone was stolen, even though would’ve still called the hotel to leave her a message at the front desk. Which he hadn’t. As such, it was time for another text, less politely worded and still attempting to communicate love and fondness, then heading out to meet with Perry. Still fruitless, which at least had become _verified_ fruitlessness. No fruit for anyone, and they had citations to prove it.

“Nest behavior is one of those things where we’ve got to triangulate if we want to figure out anything. What the Slayer said, what her Watcher wrote down, what the local civilians thought was important enough to mention later.” Perry shrugged. Buffy flipped through the folder of printouts and reports Perry had gathered together since yesterday afternoon. He’d highlighted and color-tabbed everything, and she slid her glasses off to rub her eyes. “There really hasn’t been a lot of primary research. Nobody made it a priority. Most of what I was able to dig up is only a couple decades old. Anything past that, and –”

“And nobody asked the vampires.”

“That’s about the size of it. What we’ve got is on modern nests, so if this_ has_ happened in the past with the whole nest clearing out like that, we just don’t know. But like you said, if Spike of all…people hasn’t heard of it happening, it’s probably unprecedented.”

“Back to square one.” Buffy looked around his home office – the Watcher Auxiliary plaque on the wall thanking him for all his years of active service, the overcrowded bookshelves – and was about to ask another question when her phone went off.

“What is it?”

“I just got a text. Oh, thank God, it’s from Spike. I was starting to worry.” As text messages go, it wasn’t the most reassuring possible one:_ I found the nest. Everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?_ She dashed off a quick reply, _Glad to hear it. Where are you and when will you be back tonight?_ and slid her phone away.

“Is something wrong with you two?”

“Nothing’s wrong, he just didn’t come back to the hotel last night. He sounds like he’s doing all right. Found what he was looking for, lucky him.” She sighed. “I guess I’ll go get to reading.”

She briefly considered taking everything back to the hotel, but Perry’s apartment was all of two blocks from campus. The UC Berkeley library was a beautiful building, exactly the sort of place for getting to mounds of granular research. Sitting down at a free table in the big reading room, she took a moment to close her eyes and take in the smells and small sounds, run her fingers over the edges of the papers and pretend – and yes, there it all was, the stacks and stairs behind her, the little cage off to the side, all the books laid out in front of her, Giles pestering her to get on with the reading. _Come now, you can’t expect this all to read itself, _his memory echoed. She could always hear him best in a library. She let herself remember his rare happy-proud-victory smile, then flipped open the folder, slid her glasses on, and got to the research.

There wasn’t much she didn’t already know, though some of the details were good to remember. Before nests, it’d mostly been packs. The patterns didn’t change much: vampire settles somewhere new; gets a sense of the lay of the land; decides to head to the top of the food chain and/or local pecking order; climbs their way up on a mountain of human bodies with piles of dust in their wake; only moves on due to a bigger, badder vampire taking over, or a biggest, baddest slayer taking them on, or boredom. Spike had usually gone with the boredom option.

The new research on the development of modern nesting habits wasn’t much of an eye-opener. At least, not for her. Buffy had her own sources, separate and apart from the League, and it was usually a bit more accurate. She skimmed over the heavy history segments helpfully color-coded for her convenience and lingered on the paragraphs talking about the rise of vampire culture. At least, as such a thing could reasonably be considered. Again, there was nothing she didn’t already know, and again, it was all good to remember: the ones left in the world were working hard to make sure everyone thought it’d be worth it to keep them around. Sticking together wasn’t just for humans these days.

Buffy leaned her head back to stare out the skylight, then gathered up the papers to head out back to the hotel. She figured she’d grab lunch on the way, then see about touching base with a couple people. She went with a long walk through campus and one of its gardens first, seeing exactly who her audience was going to be. It wasn’t hard to figure out who they were. The campus was at that very particular time in between the end of classes and graduation when there wasn’t much to do except enjoy the wait, and the students that wouldn’t be coming back were the ones most enjoying themselves. They were everywhere, in the sun and shade, on benches and lawns, up the hills and down the paths, savoring this last moment of true, genuine freedom from responsibilities by not even thinking about the future.

It was _definitely_ worth throwing some fear into them. Didn’t even have to be any particular fear. Just fear. They’d be full of general all-purpose fear soon enough. Better to give them some advice on dealing with it ahead of time, so they’d have it for when they needed it.

Buffy reread Spike’s message, trying to dig out more meaning from the five sentences than what was right on the surface. He had his phone and could send her texts, but it wasn’t like him to be so repetitive. Or, for that matter, so bland in his choice of words. Now that the relief of just hearing back from him had worn off, she had the mental space to be curious about exactly what he meant by everything._ We’re all fine here, now, thank you _– what on Earth did he have to _thank_ her for? Checking in on him? He wouldn’t thank her just for sending him a message. If he wanted to check in and get her off his back while he indulged in vampire-only bonding rituals, he’d have tossed off something a lot simpler. Something like,_ I found the nest and we’re all right, more to come later. _Asking her how she was doing, that…

A sound Buffy couldn’t quite place twirled around her ears. _Everything’s perfectly all right now. _He didn’t use perfectly like that. She couldn’t hear Spike saying that. She could almost hear someone else, like a song she hadn’t heard in ages sliding back into her mind. Lyrics without the singer. If she could read the lyrics she’d remember the tune, except she couldn’t figure out the song from that one line.

Her phone buzzed again in her hand. Another message from Spike slid up onto the screen, and when she read it, her stomach turned to ice.

_Can’t talk now. We’re going to have company._


	6. fly a little fly

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "California Sun" as covered by The Ramones.

Now wasn’t the time for a panic situation. It wasn’t ever the time for a panic situation, but now was_ especially_ not the time. Concern, absolutely, she could do concern. Worry, she could do that too. Going for panic was the best way to make sure nobody else understood the situation was panic-worthy. It meant that as much as she wanted to scream and punch a load-bearing wall to see a roof come down, she had to play the old PBS MathNet ‘What Do We Know?’ game. Of course, there wasn’t any winning that game today. Not with her luck right now.

She checked with Perry, who didn’t have anything new since they’d met an hour and a half earlier. The receptionist at Angel’s museum two blocks away didn’t have anything she could share, either.

“When’s he supposed to get in?”

Joanna shrugged her shoulders and feather crest. “Around noon. You want to leave a message for him for when he gets in?”

“Do you have a number I could use to call him? It’s a little more urgent than just leaving a message.”

“We’d rather not do that. It’s our policy to maintain privacy for our artists.”

“I’ll just bet it is. Okay, then. How about you let him know it’s Buffy Summers who wanted to talk?”

Not a card she liked playing, but what a card to play. She got the surprised face, the muffled gasp, the hasty apology, and the landline phone handed over with the number to call right there. And not a card she liked wasting, either. He wasn’t at the hotel, which meant she didn’t have a choice about leaving a message there for when he got back, whenever that might be.

The wall was looking more and more tempting. Joanna was looking more and more worried, and it was a cold splash of water on a hot day to know at least one person had some idea how bad things felt for her. Spike and Angel could take care of themselves. They were professionals at taking care of themselves, with hundreds of years of practice. Except if Spike said he was going to have company – _everyone_ knew what it meant to say you were going to have company.

Vampires going missing, check. Angel and Spike going missing along with the rest of the Bay Area’s vamp nests and currently in danger, double-check. This not being seen as a problem by anyone else except the lovely receptionist, triple-check.

“Ms. Summers?” Joanna asked quietly, somehow managing to cower while standing up. “I’m not sure what else I can do to help you right now, so if you –”

“I’m going,” Buffy snapped. She glanced, then looked, at the way Joanna was folding her crest all the way down, how she was trying to crawl backwards through the wall to get away from her. “I’m sorry,” she forced out. “I’m not having a good day and I’m sorry for taking it out on you. Thanks for trying to help.” She turned to go, then spun back around. “Actually, if I could – would you mind if I just dipped into your galley for a few minutes? There’s a couple more phone calls I need to make, and it’d be a lot better if I could make them now. It’d be a_ huge_ favor.”

“Of course.” Her crest rose and fell in relief ushering Buffy around and back. The galley was as Buffy had last seen it the other day, down to the blinds pulled tight over the window. She didn’t stop for tea this time around, instead jumping right into calling the local League office. Maybe, and this was at least a _solid_ maybe, with Spike and Angel missing there was a chance to get some momentum going.

“You’re sure they’re related incidents?” Lani asked. “They’ve got plenty of enemies. It could be two things at the same time.”

“It’s no coincidence. Believe me. I haven’t believed in those since I was in high school, and don’t get me started on how long ago that was. I’d be willing to believe it’s not as serious as I think it is, and I’m certain these aren’t unrelated. I don’t know why it’s all happening, and I know it’s all from the same root cause.” 

“Can’t blame whoever’s behind this,” Lani said. “You’re going after vampires, you’ll want those two accounted for, and –” Buffy pulled in a hiss through her teeth and Lani went quiet. “Sorry. Okay. You met with Perry earlier, you talked with us yesterday, we don’t have anything new, I’ll go get a task force together. I think Myrna and Iona are free, I can get them to start some groundwork. Flatfooting it, get some intel. They can start this afternoon. You called the police yet?” 

“Not yet. I was going to as soon as we were done. You need me in on this task force?”

“No. If we don’t want to draw more attention to this – we don’t, right?”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“So if we don’t, I’m sorry, but you asking around, that’s going to get attention. We’ll get it looked into. Leave the police to me. I’ll get on that right away. Don’t worry. About this, I mean. Fish and Wildlife, too, I think technically…”

“Not the time, please, Lani._ Really_ not the time.”

“Sorry, Buffy. Look, we’ll get on this, you sit pretty and I’ll get back to you tonight.”

“All right. Thank you.”

Back out in the sunshine, she tried to take a few deep breaths to get back to center. The local demon community wouldn’t be all that forthcoming, even to Slayers, because even if they knew something, they wouldn’t want to care. The fewer vampires there were, the easier things got for the non-bloodsuckers walking amongst the ordinary humans. Buffy could still knock a few skulls around herself, but without any idea where to start or anyone to help out with the skull-knocking, it’d take hours if not days to get to someone who’d give her anything. Plus, Lani was right. If everyone knew she was out asking questions, the people that could answer her would be hightailing it out of here.

Since there wasn’t anything she could do, and nothing she could punch or decapitate, she was stuck with waiting. What fabulous luck. She might as well hurry up and get on with that. Physical distractions always helped the waiting go faster. A lifetime ago, she’d have gone patrolling. Today she settled on a power march. Head up, core tight, eyes forward, purposefully not thinking about missing vampires, she started walking and let the world get out of her way. She wasn’t looking where she was going and rounded a curve on a park lawn when the alarm went off at the back of her skull.

The vampire was pretty close, not right on her heels, but if they’d tripped off that alarm they couldn’t be that far. She peered around, trying to see if there were any dark shadows they’d ducked into, scanning the people out walking. The alarm faded and disappeared: gone fast, out of her range. It couldn’t be _that_ easy to lose someone in a daysuit in an open city park.

“I’m not in the mood for teasing,” she said loud enough to be sure she was heard. She really, _really_ wasn’t in the mood for being teased. Not from a vampire, not from a demon, not from a human. Her declaration got a few people to glance her way. Most of them kept on walking. Old ladies talking to nothing were a pretty ordinary sight in Berkeley.

Buffy looked around again, and there it was, right back at the back of her skull. She couldn’t tell who it was specifically unless it was a vampire she knew as well as Spike. What she could tell was it was the same vampire from yesterday’s lunch. Whoever they were, they were persistent, and clearly following her for a reason. Not a good thing right now.

Let them come.

“What do you want?” She asked, whipping around fast enough to startle the vampire as she stared directly into the reflective faceplate. 

The vampire didn’t respond in any meaningful way, just tilting their head like that’d help them hear her better.

“Come out and tell me. I know those things have buttons for talking. Just make this easy for both of us. Help me help you, please. Give me something, anything.” Still nothing. Buffy shrugged and grabbed the vampire by the throat to lift them into the air. Not like they needed oxygen. Other people in the park stopped to stare and gasp, though Buffy couldn’t bring herself to care. “I’m not having what you’d want to call a good day right now, so I’d _really_ like it if you’d be nice enough to not make it any worse than it already is and tell me what the hell it is that you want from me.” She tightened her grip to make her point, held them up another moment, and then lowered her hand to set them back down.

The vampire still didn’t do anything. No moves to show deference to the great merciful Slayer or making with the running away. All that happened was they took two steps back to give Buffy a little personal space. That was it. Two steps. The vampire remained, completely unconcerned with everyone’s stares on the two silent figures. They watched from the darkness and silence of the daysuit, waiting for Buffy to make the next move.

Buffy kept glaring, deliberately turned her back on the vampire and began the long walk back to the hotel. Everyone watched her go, but at least this time, she could tell herself it was because of the weird even for Berkeley sight of a vampire trailing after someone in broad daylight without any hint of subtlety. The vampire kept their distance, staying far enough out of her reach she couldn’t easily punch them. Down the streets, through the hills, until the two of them reached to the hotel. They kept the same distance when they got inside, following not at all discretely up the stairs, through the hallway, and only stopping at the door of the hotel room.

This wasn’t her home, just where she was staying for a little while, and the vampire was still waiting for her to invite them in.

_Fabulous. The one polite vampire stalker on the planet._

Buffy bent over her jewelry box and put on her pure silver cross. In the same movement, she stretched her arms, picking up one of her travel throwing axes. Then she turned around, axe clearly visible. “Yes, you can come in. So long as you tell me what’s going on here. I know you can talk through those things, so make with the verbalizing.”

The vampire crossed the threshold, carefully closing the door behind them. They looked around the room, then walked over to the window to test the curtains and make sure they were shut tight. Buffy was about three seconds from asking them to get on with it when the vampire stepped up and put a gloved hand on her face. Her, Buffy Summers, longest serving Slayer in history, hand on her face. The absolute balls, the complete _gall_ to just make the attempt froze her for a moment. The blank faceplate showed only her own face, and all the anger in her eyes. 

“What the hell?” She batted the gloved hand away. “If this is some kind of new prostration technique, I’m_ so_ not in the mood. Now get on with it and start with the talking. Pronto, posthaste, right this goddamn minute and give me a reason not to dust you right here.”

They took a step back, then another, giving Buffy the space she wanted. Something in their stance, the tilt of their head, struck a note of familiarity – again, like lyrics without the tune. Standing in the middle of the living area of the hotel suite, they seemed like they were looking right at her. Without seeing their face, it was impossible to guess what they were thinking, but Buffy got the feeling the vampire didn’t want to be here any more than she did, except there was something in the way they stood that gave Buffy the impression that they_ needed_ to be here.

The vampire started to take off the helmet.

Daysuits weren’t designed to be easily removed. There were clasps and latches, buckles and clamps, that made it almost impossible to take off by yourself. Instead, it was merely extremely difficult, not unlike ancient diving suits and full-plate armor. The vampire reached around to undo the clamps on the back of the neck, then the ones underneath the chin, break the seal all around. Click-clack-unlock, and those black-gloved hands lifted the helmet away for Buffy to finally see –

“Hello, Buffy,” said Drusilla.


	7. another way to scream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "South London Forever" by Florence + The Machine.

Up came the axe, only Drusilla’s hands were on Buffy’s arms before she could let it fly.

“Now, now, dear heart, let’s not be having any hastiness,” she crooned. “I’ve come much too far for that.”

Buffy pulled a leg up, kicking Drusilla right in the solar plexus. It got her away, flying through the air and right into the wall by the kitchenette. Plaster crumbled as she fell, and Buffy didn’t let herself worry over who’d be paying for the finishing. Drusilla practically leapt to her feet, coming straight at Buffy, her face still human. The axe flew, Drusilla dodged, then snarled at Buffy through blunt teeth.

“Would you_ listen!”_ She shrieked. “Would you well listen for once in all your years!”

“I will when you give me something to listen to!” Buffy eyed Drusilla, who wasn’t attacking or retaliating or getting any closer. “What gives with the stalking and the silent treatment? While I’m at it, what gives with the not trying to kill me?”

“Not here for you, selfish girl. Not here for you or any of your nasty poppets. Can’t hear naught but your own thoughts, spinning all pell-mell skelter through your head.” She kept her distance, hands up in supplication and keeping them where Buffy could see them, and a glint in her eye that had Buffy watching her carefully. She’d barely changed since she’d last seen her almost seventy years ago. That was the thing with vampires: the world changed while they remained the same. To be fair, there were a few subtle differences. Her hair was in a single, heavy braid instead of elaborate curls or loose down her shoulders, and she didn’t have on any makeup. “Should keep your promises, Slayer. Or the nasty, wriggling fears will have their fill of you.”

Buffy’s fists didn’t come down. She could still grab one of the throwing knives if she needed a weapon. “You’re here, you’re talking, get on with it. You know what’s going on here? You made all those vampires disappear?”

Drusilla untucked her hair, letting it hang down her back. Casually, almost languidly, she brushed powdered plaster off her shoulders. “What’s happened isn’t my doing. Wasn’t any dream of mine, no spell of my making, no wish I’d cast. We’re too late to stop the goats and the lambs are on their way to the slaughter. All the princesses can do is only ease their pain.”

“You came all the way here from Russia for that? Out of the goodness of your dead heart for, what, stopping _part_ of a tragedy?”

“Ukraine,” she corrected with a sly smile, smoothly pulled the axe from the wall. “Exactly that, dear heart. More than, if you’ll be a good little Slayer and believe me.” She twirled the axe around like she was a cheerleader with a baton. “Got no reason to fight against you now. Better to fight_ with_ you. I’m here for Spike, same as you. Best for us both to be here together.”

“You know Spike’s in danger.”

“Much.”

“And you’re willing to help me because you want to help him that badly?”

“I wouldn’t have come if I wasn’t.”

“You think I need your help with this?”

“I know you do.”

“You’ve killed friends of mine, you’ve been in hiding for decades, and now you’re here all ‘help me help you’ because you _care?_ I have no idea what’s going on in your head, but I_ know_ you know how I feel about you. So forgive me for not wanting to trust you right off the bats in your belfrey.”

Drusilla sighed, equal parts exasperation and disappointment. Slowly moving across the room, she held the axe out, handle-first, to Buffy. “Take it.”

The shock was wearing off. The alarm was still on, and she could think through it enough to understand this was_ Drusilla_ standing in her hotel room. Drusilla, who’d killed a Slayer back when there were only two girls in all the world, who could sweep all through Buffy’s head and pull out every possible secret she had to hide, who had practically vanished from the face of the Earth and hadn’t been credibly sighted in decades. Mad seer, dangerous vampire, offering back the throwing axe all politely, like she did this sort of thing all the time. Who wasn’t here for Buffy, but had come for Spike.

Her phone rang. Drusilla cocked her head. Buffy glared. Her phone rang again.

“Shouldn’t you answer that?” Drusilla asked.

Keeping her eyes on Drusilla, Buffy carefully reached into her pocket and pulled out the ringing phone. “Hello,” she pushed out as evenly as she could manage.

“Hey! Great, I’m glad I caught you,” Felicity said. “I was doing some reading and I came over this one thing from –”

“That’s great, Felicity, are you sure this is the best time?”

“Pretty sure, yeah, since you wanted us to call you in case we found anything. Anyway, there’s this reference to a vampire nest evacuation of a town in Bangladesh in a nineteenth-century Watcher’s diary that I put up against these other demonic –”

“This is great, but Lani said she’d be getting some people together, and I think –”

“Lani?” Felicity sounded taken aback. “What do you mean? She ran out of here a few hours ago, said she had a family emergency or something.”

“Sorry, what?” Drusilla was starting to look impatient. Not a good look. “I talked to her this afternoon. She said she’d be getting Iona and Myrna together to head out for some investigation.”

“I don’t know how she’d do that, since Iona’s still out on maternity leave. Maybe she meant Fiona? I think Fiona might be taking care of it. She said she’d be heading out to the bars and dance clubs, do some research the old-fashioned way.”

“You know, I think she might have meant Fiona,” Buffy said. Now Drusilla was smiling and humming to herself, looking pleased with what was unfolding around her. “That’d be an easy one to mix up. Okay, right, the nineteenth century Watcher thing. I know I said I’d like whatever you have as soon as you have it, but I was right in the middle of something when you called, so could I call you back in a couple hours? I don’t think anything’s going to happen in a couple of hours.” 

“Sure thing. If that’s what’s easier for you. Long as I’m waiting, I’ll see if I can dig up a couple more sources.” She didn’t even sound annoyed; instead, glad to help however she could.

“Thank you, Felicity.”

“You’re welcome.” She hung up, leaving Buffy to silence. Silence, and Drusilla, still standing there with the axe held out to her. Drusilla, who hadn’t come here for Buffy, and was willing to stand at her side to help her get Spike to safety.

No, that wasn’t exactly it. They weren’t on the same side. More standing side by side and facing the same direction. Which, with Drusilla, was probably the best she could hope for.

Buffy reached out and took the axe.

“What’s in this for you?”

“Spike,” Drusilla said simply.

“That’s it. Just Spike.”

“Just our Spike.”

“I’m finding it a little hard to grasp you waltzing in out of nowhere and thinking that just Spike is reason enough.”

“Look at you. Gone all cross, not wanting to believe the best of me, thinking you know better. Spike is always enough. Sunshine doesn’t want to trust in old love.”

_Stupid psychics. _“Still could use a tiny bit more.”

“I want to help, simple and plain. He’s mine still and I’m his, always. The prince doesn’t fight for the princess any longer. He’s sunshine’s champion. He loves a new way now, earned the spark to prove it so. The sunshine’s made him a better man, more than I could. You’ve done…” The only way Buffy could describe Drusilla’s expression was she was looking_ into_ Buffy. “You’ve done good to him.”

“You mean, I’m good_ for_ him.”

“No.” Drusilla shook her head, a soft smile at the edges of her mouth and the middle of her eyes. “I mean you did good _to_ him. From you, good was done to him.”

Buffy let the words roll through her head. She took a deep breath. “They’ve got Angel too?”

“Paired up neatly.”

“You know where they are?”

“Someplace nearby. Not so far. Tucked up in the hills – they’re in there, all of them, crammed tight and not nearly safe.” She lifted up the helmet and put it down, gently, on the end table by the couch before sitting down and crossing her hands over her lap. “They’ve made it into their home, that much I can see, though there’s still strange machines about. No one needed it, so they took it over, turned it into a home so nobody could come rescuing anyone, and it hadn’t got cleaned out before it got locked up.”

Drusilla closed her eyes, tilting her head up and rocking gently back and forth. “It’s full of so many big, fancy machines for tiny playthings. It’s not been used in the last few years, left to dust and darkness. They took it over since no one would be watching there. I’d know it if I saw it. I can’t risk it to look about myself, not with them ready to snatch up any stragglers come to play.” 

She looked at Buffy, seemingly genuinely sorry. “If I thought I might be victorious, I’d have gone to seek it out, keep them from doing all their planned nastiness to my family. They’re not doing science there. I’d be locked up in with all the others and couldn’t help free anyone. They’d set me up like the rest. They wouldn’t try such cruelty on you if you’re found sniffing about their mission station.”

Meaning slowly clicked into place. “Okay, that narrows it down.” Now that the axe was away, out came the phone. Big building up in the hills. That was a start.

“What are you doing?” Drusilla asked.

“Trying to find a picture of what you’re talking about. What does this building look like?” One of the biggest problems of working with psychics was that if they didn’t know what they were looking at, it made making sense of the visions that much harder.

“You can see it in there?” She leaned forward without getting up from the couch. “In that little thing?”

“Phones can do that nowadays. So what does this place_ look_ like? From the outside.”

“How can it find the pictures?”

“It can talk to other phones that might have it on them. I’ll explain it better later. Again, what’s this place look like?”

“Oh. All right.” She nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer. Buffy blinked, surprised that’d worked. “It’s up in the hills.”

“Got that.”

“Round. There’s a canopy atop the roundabout with no painted horses inside. Some of the same pieces. Platforms and cranks and nothing for children to ride. All the lights and wires of Tivoli and nothing for children. Nothing to make them play and laugh. Massive gears spinning about so fast everything inside gets broken into pieces.” She twirled a hand in the air by her head, round and round. “It broke the pieces of the world until there was nothing left to break. Playthings but no playing. You could see the whole of the cities and all the islands if you stood atop it. You can see where we’re going. Beautiful cities, both of this one we’re in now and the one for Saint Francis.”

“Does this place have – hang on.” Berkeley _had_ done some major science experiments, the kind that people talked about without really understanding everything. The sort of experiments people would describe with things like atom smashing and light slicing. And maybe Drusilla didn’t know enough about modern science to understand phones were attached to the internet, or even that the internet was a thing that existed, but Buffy did. Three searches and a lot of scrolling later, Buffy held her phone out at arm’s length and asked, “Is this it?”

“My goodness, that’s it _precisely_. How did you manage to find it on that tiny device?”

“It’s a smart phone.”

“Very clever little phone.” Drusilla smiled. “What else can it do?”

“You can play with it after we rescue Spike,” Buffy almost laughed with relief. “We _will_ do that, right?”

“Got to go soon while the night’s still here. Can’t wait for the dawn, or it’ll be far too late to save all the little lambs. They’ll be gone for slaughter. Get our knight and keep him safe.” She shook her head. “There’s not going to be any saving all of them. Must be as it always is.”

“But Spike can be saved if we move tonight.”

“Quite so.”

“Well, good. I’ve got a speech to give tomorrow.” Drusilla opened her mouth, then closed it, nodding. Buffy punched in the address, cued up the directions, and frowned. “It’s just a couple miles away. Convenient. But inconvenient, we can’t drive in. The place is on a private university road. We’re going to have to hoof it up there up the side of the mountain, which means we’re going to have to wait for it to get dark so you don’t have to lug that suit around.”

“Kind of you to think of me.”

“It also means I can get a nap in before we head off. And have something to eat.” She let her shoulders sag down a bit. No longer was she of the age that she could stay awake for days on little sleep and minimal food. Once, she’d made it four days on zero sleep and nothing but a couple of peanut butter cups to defeat and send whatever that demon was, Larry or Lloyd or Lewis, back to his home dimension and stop him from razing half of Canada to ashes. Then she’d let herself sleep. Gone were those days. She wasn’t in her forties anymore. Now, if she was going to be out all night, she needed to rest up for it. “Can you come back here in five hours?”

“Of course.” She stood up and tucked her braid back down into the suit. “I’ll go get my things.” Once her helmet was secured, she wasn’t Drusilla anymore. Just another daysuited vampire going about their business, whatever that might be.

After she closed the door behind her, Buffy took a couple of minutes to collapse onto the bed, arms at her sides and staring at the new hole in the wall. Not her problem. Literally, as per her rider: any damage would get billed to the hosting organization. Berkeley could afford the spackle. And she herself couldn’t afford to turn down any help, no matter where it was coming from.

She plugged in her phone to charge, then grabbed the oils and herbs and permanent marker from the emergency spell kit. When she got up from her nap five and a half hours later, her warnings and wards unnecessary after all, her phone was back up to full battery power and there was a four-hour old message from Lani waiting for her. She’d called the police and the local wildlife office just to cover all possible bases and was heading out with Myrna and Iona, ready to seriously prod buttock and they’d be sure to have something to share tomorrow morning.

If that wasn’t the best thing she’d heard all day, she’d eat her hat.

Not having any such edible hats lying around, Buffy settled for an omelet. Nothing fancy or flashy, just something easy, high-protein, creating the illusion of control over her life for as long as she had the peppers frying, the eggs and cheese stirring in the pan, and the food on her plate. For as long as she could wash the dishes and allow herself another phone call to the League office. Felicity’s report was thorough, and Buffy murmured her way through it until she could politely hang up again.

When she unlocked the door, Drusilla was standing in the hallway with a small duffel, waiting to be invited in.


	8. required of you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "The Kid" by Ben Nichols.

Whoever had the wherewithal and forethought and_ capacity_ to kidnap both Angel and Spike, and _keep them kidnapped_, spoke to a level of planning that equally impressed and infuriated Buffy. Incompetent loons could generally be defeated with a few swift punches to key soft areas. Villains that took the time to plan typically knew to factor in worst-case scenarios and be proactive about things. Like making their stronghold someone’s house so vampires couldn’t get in. Using an abandoned campus building as a stronghold said they took their time to organize, which meant Buffy probably had a real battle ahead of her. Berkeley wasn’t Sunnydale, with its utter lack of zoning regulations, but apparently, enough paperwork could make any building get lost, no matter how big or valuable it’d been once upon a time.

It also meant that, no matter how much she wanted to march up the hillside and kick down the front door, they had to take the long way around to avoid detection. A couple of women walking alone usually got attention, but an old woman, no matter her company, could walk just about anywhere. That said, even old women got noticed sometimes, and tonight she wasn’t risking it. So she and Drusilla started out on Berkeley’s sidewalks, moving through the town, skipping past the university entirely. They looped around the big stadium to double back and hit the hiking trails already built into the hillside. 

For most of her childhood, Buffy’s main experiences with nature had been filtered through field trips. They’d all been very carefully monitored and controlled, where the worst thing that could happen was falling into a shallow river and coming home muddy. She’d liked the hikes, though. Being out of the classroom made being out in the dirt worthwhile. The trips had been on easy-to-walk paths – trails through fields and streambeds packed down from all the hikers who’d come before. They’d always had a harsh kind of beauty to them. She’d understood, a little bit, they weren’t places that needed humans, not the way gardens and cities did. Sometimes they’d record the number of animals and plants they saw and learn about different environments, and sometimes they’d walk through some old mining or farming area and see the skeletons of buildings and get the harsh lesson that civilization was inherently ephemeral. Then she’d been Called, and nature was bigger and hungrier and filled with more terrifying things than what she’d ever thought to previously imagine.

Now, hiking up the Berkeley hills with Drusilla by her side, on wooden steps embedded into the side of the hill, she felt a quiet echo of those old trips. Even in the dark, Buffy could make out the shapes of the native trees and bushes – manzanita and madrone, live oak and serviceberry. Their familiarity was a comfort, and the smell of dirt on a dusty hillside path hadn’t changed in eighty years.

At a switchback, she double-checked her phone. Thank the heavens for unlimited data and roaming plans. “This says it’s up that way. I think there’s a fence but that shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll circle around and go in through the front.”

“There they are.” Drusilla smiled at the city below them. Buffy had gone with a blouse, loose trousers, and flat-soled boots. Drusilla had also gone with boots, but she’d changed right out of her daysuit into fresh black jeans without excusing herself to the bathroom or telling Buffy what she was doing. “The stars are down. Can you see them? The stars are down. I remember all their names. I thought I’d forgotten, but I remember.” 

She turned to look at Buffy, still smiling. “They’re ready. They’ll be listening when it’s time for the animals to go splitting the night.” She whipped her head up to the sky and howled. A real, honest-to-God animal howl, echoing in the dark, and she got a howl right back from somewhere out in the hills beyond. Not quite the same, because hers was high and thin, and what came back was low and round. She howled again, and whatever was out there gave her another in return. “They heard me,” she said, eyes fixed on the sky. “Not the same and they still heard me. Nearly kith, almost kin. I’ll have to change it all for California.”

“Drusilla, _please.”_ Buffy reached out and grabbed Drusilla’s arm. That did the trick of getting her back to reality. 

“We’ll hop the fence,” she said, getting back to the intended subject. “Leap it like a hedgerow, watching out for the thorns and shrikes. We’ll make a game of it, you and I.”

“Not particularly.” 

She hummed. “It would’ve been nice to have eaten before we set out.”

“What? You had like four mugs of haema.”

“It curbed the hungers well enough, though only just. Nothing from that device was ever living. Naught save fill and nil to give.” She made a small little sound, like a growl or a bark. “Oh, to feast on proper flesh tonight would be richly earned. I shan’t.” Her voice was hard, and she gave Buffy a strong, cold look. “Not without the Generalissima’s permission.”

“If it comes to that, I’ll let you know.” Just roll with it. Roll with it and try to direct her as best she could – Spike had managed for nearly twelve decades; Buffy could handle her for an evening. One evening with Drusilla was like a month of sane nights. “Come on, we’re getting close.” She started walking, and Drusilla kept pace.

“Barely any more to go, yes. I can almost see it. I’ll need to be invited.”

“How exactly were you planning on that?”

“Asking nicely.”

“All right.” Don’t engage if there’s no reason to, just let the crazy go on past.

There was the fence, just like the maps said. Barbed wire at the top with grass and fuzz and feathers caught on the points – _thorns and shrikes_ – that was easy enough to flip herself over, once she climbed up high enough. Buffy probably could’ve leapt it if she had a running start, which wasn’t an option when climbing up a hill in what was supposed to be a quiet sting operation.

Drusilla managed from a standing start. “Show-off,” she muttered, pointedly ignoring Drusilla’s proud little chuckle.

From the fence, it was more of a walk than a hike. The paths were paved, and the parking lots were all flat surfaces. A couple more turns, because this was the Berkeley hills, and then they were coming around the corner to the front door of the old Advanced Light Source building and the brightly-lit parking lot. The place was officially abandoned, but that didn’t mean they’d shut off the electricity. According to the website, the building was decommissioned in 2065, left standing and empty because nobody wanted to tear it down and the local architectural conservation society was still trying to work with the university instead of running ramshackle over it. In the meantime, neither side would compromise, which meant it was basically free for the squatting.

Without any better idea, Buffy was about to knock on the front door when Drusilla grabbed her and pulled her into the shadows. Buffy nearly cried out when a hand clapped over her mouth. “Shush!” Drusilla hissed right in Buffy’s ear. “Poppet’s about to let you in! Believe her and she’ll give you all the pretty lies.” Buffy stopped struggling, then stumbled two steps when Drusilla shoved her back out into the light. 

Then she saw the car pull into the parking lot.

Acting casual was a way to look suspicious. Better to be open and friendly. Best of all was to play like this was where she was supposed to be – and oh, she could do that. She could_ so_ do that. Back straight, shoulders loose, she didn’t push it by throwing in a wave at the driver to deliberately draw attention to herself, even though the temptation was there. Especially when she saw who got out of the driver’s side door.

“Hi there, Natalie,” Buffy said, making the young Slayer jump and skitter back against the car.

“Buffy?” Short, with straight black hair parted down the middle in a Cleopatra bob, Natalie was maybe a quarter of Buffy’s age and always dressed like she was on her way to philosophy class. She got her composure right back, and Buffy could see from the way Natalie’s body tensed she wasn’t exactly glad to see her. “What are you doing here?”

Worst-case scenario, she and Drusilla could grab her and ply information out of her one way or another, hopefully with limited screaming. Best-case, Natalie spilled everything she needed to hear and invited them both inside.

Keeping her voice pitched from the bottom of her lungs and making sure she maintained a reasonable amount of eye contact, Buffy took the one shot in the dark she had: “Lani told me to come on by tonight.”

“You talked to Lani?”

“Sure did. Just this morning. She sounded kind of excited.” Lani_ had_ been concerned and a little stressed, which could be interpreted as excited if someone squinted and looked at it sideways. Focusing on Natalie’s body language to gauge her own lies, Buffy went on, “She said tonight was the night, and it’d be nice for me to be here.”

“Oh!” That did it. The tensing jumped from anxious to happy. Natalie was fully delighted to see Buffy standing in the parking lot of an abandoned science building at nine-thirty on a weekday night. “Oh, she did? Wonderful! Lani didn’t tell me about talking to you, but, well, if you’re here now she must have, mustn’t she? This is splendid. Absolutely, totally. I just need…”

“Let me give you a hand with that.” Make sure they wanted you there, make sure you lend a hand – being helpful with a smile was absolutely one of the best ways to slip inside somewhere. Buffy took two bags and closed the trunk after Natalie filled her arms with the other five. Behind them, she felt Drusilla lurking before slipping off her radar again.

“Thank you,” Natalie grinned.

“You want me to get the door? Do I need a key? She said to come over, but not much else.”

“No, I’ll get that.” It took a little maneuvering and Buffy taking on another shopping bag for them to get through the door and into the building. The place was unlocked, which made a fair amount of sense: there wasn’t much reason to lock it if they had other precautions in place. The two of them went in through the front door and to the lobby, just like if they were going to work. No lights were on inside, but there was enough from the parking lot to get them up the stairs and down a hallway. It felt exactly like walking into one of Dawn’s old favorite puzzle video games. Enough light to see you couldn’t see much at all, empty corridors that weren’t themselves scary except for not wanting to know what was on the other side. 

“I’m so glad Lani told you ahead of time,” Natalie went on as she held the door open with her hip. “We’d all been worried, how much longer will we have to keep this under wraps, but now that you’re here – she called everyone earlier, told us tonight was the night, I didn’t think that’d also mean you’d be coming along. I’d been saying, don’t say anything until it’s done, except Lani’s always been a big believer in the whole project. Bring you on board and everyone’s going to follow.”

“It’s what comes from being a figurehead,” she intoned, only half-joking, and Natalie giggled. “That said, right now? I’m just happy to be here.” Buffy tried not to overtly look into the bags in her arms, just sneaking a peek at what was right on top. Mostly snack foods. Some bowls, some plastic spoons, which meant the cool feeling by her left elbow had to be ice cream. Party stuff. Which probably meant they figured this would go off so well they’d be able to celebrate right away. As much as Buffy wanted to go for the whole bad spy movie _so to make sure we’re both on the same page, fill me in on everything _routine, there wasn’t a better way to out herself as an interloper. There were ways to get people like Natalie to talk, though. There were always ways to make people talk. “There was one thing she didn’t tell me. I mean, she told me this is someone’s home, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Whose house is it? Lani didn’t give me the specifics, and I wanted to be sure to thank her. Or him. Whoever.”

“She didn’t? That’s odd. But I guess it’s for security.” Buffy made a noncommittal sound to encourage Natalie to keep talking. “I suppose that since you’re here now, it won’t hurt. It’s Robert’s house. We really owe it to him – we couldn’t be doing this without someone making it their residence, and he was the one who volunteered.”

“He’s a thoughtful guy.”

“He is, isn’t he.”

“I didn’t think there’d be a party afterwards, though.”

“A party?”

“Well, sure. What else would the ice cream be for?”

“Oh!” Natalie smiled and opened another door, leading Buffy down another dim corridor. Drusilla was off her radar, but there was…there was definitely something lurking just at the edges, a hum she didn’t usually get. Vampires at a certain distance were too faint to feel unless she was really trying, or if there were a lot of them. Whoever this group was hadn’t taken them far, when they’d taken the vampires. “You can thank Stella for that. She likes a serious hit of sugar after spellcasting, and when she asked for some ice cream, everyone else wanted me to grab some for them too. And you know how one thing leads to another.”

“I guess if anything deserves an old-fashioned ice cream social to celebrate, it’ll be this.”

“Ice cream socials and then some!” She grinned at Buffy. “Do you think two bottles of chocolate syrup will be enough?”

“At this point, we’ve got what we’ve got. We’re in through here?”

“Yes. Right here.” Light crept from behind a door that Natalie opened to hubbub and way-too-chipper voices. “Hey! Hey, everyone! Look who I ran into in the parking lot!”

The everyone in question was only twenty-some-odd people. Mostly women, only three guys, everyone in the office that’d been refurbished as a living space – the big glass wall on the far side of the room doing nothing to shake the video game vibes out of her head. The humming was getting louder and deeper, resonating under her skin. With all their eyes on her, Buffy knew it was time to throw in a little wave, keep on smiling, hand off her bags to the nearest convenient set of arms and let the rest of the room do the work for her. Time to use their happiness against them and get them at ease to tell her what she needed. Everyone was dressed casually in working clothes, jeans and t-shirts and even sneakers, like this was a casual working day. _Nobody wears funny robes to conspiracy meetings anymore._

“I’m so pleased you’re here with us tonight,” said one of the guys. He gestured to a couch and Buffy let herself be guided along. “I honestly didn’t think you’d be coming for the initial operation. I know we’d discussed it, but I’d thought – no, it’s not important. What is, is that you’re here now.” 

“What can I say, Lani made some persuasive arguments. She really pulled something special together.” Buffy had her back to the glass wall, which was a small comfort. The hum was strongest from there, and she didn’t like knowing the _why_ without the reason for it.

“What do you mean, Lani pulled this together?”

“It’s her project, right?”

“You think – oh, of course,” he chuckled. “I shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s quite like her to take on the credit for this.”

“Yeah,” Buffy nodded furiously, “that’s Lani all over. Tell me about it. So when does this show get on the road? We’re not waiting for anyone else, are we? I mean, I haven’t seen Lani yet, so…”

“Just her and Claire. But they said they’d be here by ten-fifteen and if they aren’t, to start without them.” Natalie shrugged. “We’ve got another half-hour to get everything ready. That’s plenty of time.”

“Get a good seat,” someone called from across the room and made everyone laugh.

Buffy joined in with a half-giggle, then twisted around to glance at the glass wall. The resonating was digging into her, through her skin and to her bones, everything put on high alert with the knob turned up to eleven and then ripped off. The last time she’d remembered feeling anything like this, anything _close_ to this, was deep underneath the Hellmouth with all the ubervamps. Even now, vampires didn’t get together in this big a group, this many all together in one spot, unless they absolutely had no choice about it. As if someone crammed them all into one spot for _something_ so big and grandiose it was apparently deserving of an ice cream social once it was done.

People were asking if Natalie had remembered Prudence’s vanilla, Doris’s mint chip, Millicent’s praline, if Stella ought to do a tiny cold spell to make sure none of it melted. Eyes off her for a moment, Buffy got up, feeling shaky in a way that had nothing to do with muscles or nerves; just good old-fashioned concern and worry and fear. She walked across the room and stepped up to the glass wall, looked down and clamped a hand over her mouth.

“It’s really amazing, isn’t it?” A round, dark-skinned woman Buffy didn’t know leaned her arm against the glass. “I swear it takes my breath away every time.”

“Yeah. Breath. Gone.”

Crowded together, _penned_ in together, the space was huge and the vampires were still cowering. They had no privacy, no dignity, nothing but the clothes they were wearing. There were easily hundreds of them, some sitting, some pacing, none of them comfortable in the cavernous room. They were too far away for her to see their faces. Thank God they were too far away for her to see their faces. The alarm noise of their presence was too big for Buffy to hear, only feel. Like coming out of a grave or the sonic boom of a fireworks show: the utter silence of the biggest possible sound deep inside her bones.

“I’m Doris, by the way,” she offered. “I’m glad to meet you.”

Her name barely registered. “How…All…”

“It took some doing, getting the space cleared out for so many vampires,” Doris explained. “Most of the equipment had been cleared out before the building got decommissioned. Converting the space, securing it for when they arrived – that took a bit of time. We’d thought about separate holding chambers, but keeping them all in one spot seemed like the most efficient idea.”

“All in one place,” Buffy echoed, feeling like she was talking out of the bottom of a deep well, and that her stomach was trying to leap out of her throat. She could almost taste the acid at the back of her teeth.

She couldn’t see Spike. From this distance, even if he’d still been bleaching his hair, she couldn’t have made out Spike specifically in the whole mess of bodies.

“It makes keeping track of them easier, certainly.”

“There’s everyone from Berkeley in there. All the vampires. Lani said Berkeley, just Berkeley. She didn’t say…”

“Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, all the way down to Hayward. I helped bring in the Oakland nest.” A little pride slipped into her voice, which strengthened as she went on. “We wanted to make sure we had enough vampires for all the work we’ve planned on doing, so we decided, get as many as we can to begin with. Now_ that_ was the easy part. There was some trouble getting them here, but all in all, we did pretty well. As ever, proper preparation.”

“Prevention of poor performance.” Buffy’s mind kept sliding away from putting numbers to heads as she tried to count them all up._ Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, no, did I get that vampire over in the corner, better not to know._

Especially when one of them – a female vampire she didn’t recognize at all – turned her head to look up in Buffy’s direction, and her eyesight wasn’t too far gone to see how the vampire’s body language went from _fearful_ to _fearless_. Seeing Buffy, and pointing and shouting, getting every vampire’s attention off their current predicament to focus entirely on the great and merciful Buffy Summers standing high above them.

“Oh, look at this! Everyone, come quick!” Doris called out, and the delight in her tone made Buffy want to rip her arms off. “Have any of you ever seen this before?”

Buffy tried not to breathe too hard. Everyone squeezed in around her, angling for a good view. To a one, the vampires were all focused entirely, completely, on her. Some were on all fours with their foreheads on the ground, others were kneeling with their heads down and arms spread wide, a few were just standing and staring. She forced herself to breathe evenly and not panic as she scanned the vampires far below, looking for tall and broody or light brown curls – the two of them had to be_ somewhere._ Maybe not even in with the general population but someplace even more secure. If these lunatics had put in the work to get all these vampires, then yes, she could believe the worst.

_If Drusilla asks for permission I don’t know if I’ll say no._

Buffy looked away from the window. The man she’d been talking to was off to her right, and the other two were in deep conversation with each other over to her left. _Perfect._ “Robert?” One of them turned to look at her, someone tall with an academic’s pallor and a retro throwback duck’s-ass haircut. “I was hoping – could you show me the way to the restroom?”

“Sure, it’s right –”

“Robert, honey,” Buffy played to her age, using an old woman’s endearment, “I’m really sorry. I just want to make sure I know the way there and back, and I’d be_ so_ grateful if you’d show me the way. I’ve never been here before, and this seems like it’d be a real easy place to get lost in.”

“Ah – okay, sure,” he said. “Hey, Oliver, I’m just escorting Ms. Summers to the, um, restroom.” Buffy stood up straight and deliberately smiled as innocently as she could manage. “Don’t wait up for us, okay?”

“We’ll be fine,” Oliver assured him with a wave of his hand. “We’re just about ready to go anyway.”

“Great. Great. Ms. Summers?”

“Lead on.”

It wasn’t a total misdirection and deliberate move towards isolating the weak link in the security system. She honestly did need to use the bathroom. Not all that badly, but at her age, better to use it when she had the opportunity than risk the chance to regret it. The taps worked, and so did the toilet, and they’d even made sure to keep rolls of toilet paper out where she could grab some before heading into the stall and doing her business.

At this point, Buffy didn’t know whether to call this group of vampire kidnappers fanatics, sadists, or lunatics. She just knew she could call them polite, because Robert didn’t follow her into the women’s restroom. Twenty-three people in the whole building, and they still kept separate bathrooms by gender. It was downright quaint the way they stuck to social morays.

It also made holding him by the elbow and steering him that much easier. Because, after all, she was a small old woman who needed some help getting around.

“So, tell me,” Buffy asked, pulling Robert along gently, “satisfy my curiosity, was moving in and making this whole place your house your idea?”

“No, I wish I’d thought of it,” he said. “I was just the one who volunteered. We’d all discussed it back when we were still figuring out how to pull it off, and I figured, I don’t have a place lined up for next semester – might as well move in here.”

“I imagine it makes for a very easy commute.” 

He laughed. “It’s actually been really great for getting my thesis done. Most days there’s not a whole lot of other people around so it’s nice and quiet, good writing atmosphere. I admit, I’ll explore around the place, let myself get distracted…”

“Pretend you’re in a classic video game?”

“Exactly!” He crowed. “But trust me,” Robert’s face and voice took on fake-real-seriousness, “what I’ll usually do is find a nice office with some good natural light, set up my laptop and get to typing, and a few hours later, I’ve got a couple thousand words I can feel good about.”

“Very nice,” Buffy said. “I’m glad somebody’s using it on a daily basis. Say, how did you get all the power back on? The water for the sinks? I’d have thought everything would’ve been shut off after the university closed it down.”

“That was tricky,” he told her. “I had to do it to settle in, to really make it_ mine_ and not just a place I was sleeping. You know how the rules for – of course you know the rules for households, you’re Buffy Summers. Anyway, it meant a lot of sly paperwork, a lot of doing things to the letter so nobody would focus too hard on what I was asking them to do for me. It took a couple months, but it’s all in place for the next two years.”

“How very smart,” Buffy praised warmly, guiding him through another hallway. “You’ve really thought of everything, haven’t you.”

“We tried to be thorough,” Robert replied, keeping eye contact while they walked down a flight of stairs. “We knew there’d only be one big shot, so,” Buffy squeezed his arm as they rounded a corner. “Hey, ow.”

“So sorry,” she murmured, relaxing her grip, “could you speak up?”

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and raised his voice more than she needed to hear someone talk at a reasonable volume right next to her. “Like I said, only one big shot, and why are we heading, ow!”

“Why are we heading where, Robert?” Buffy asked with fake obliviousness, squeezing and relaxing her grip to let him know which one of them was really calling the shots.

“Why are, ow, we heading away from, ow! From the main work area?” His voice got higher in confusion and pain as she steered him towards the door. “We should be heading back to, hey, that hurts!”

“We’re heading exactly where you need to go. Don’t fuss. I can just break your legs and carry you if I have to, so keep on walking like a good little grad student and save us both some trouble.” Buffy knew she probably sounded like a demented homicidal great-aunt, and she didn’t care. Spike and Angel and all the other vampires were relying on her to save them. Robert whimpered, but kept quiet. “If this goes well you’ll even be back in time for the main event, whatever the hell it is.” He whimpered again. “And here we are.” Homicidal great-aunt, deranged game-show host, what a night she was having. She swung the doors open and pushed him out into the nighttime air. “She should be around…” 

There was a glimpse of motion against the dark and a catch along her arm. “Oh no. I don’t think so.” Buffy spun and pinned Robert against the outside wall before he could react. In the same movement, she had one of her hairsticks – seven and a half inches of tempered, spiraling steel with a charmingly sharp edge and a fine, cutting point – whipped out of her bun and pressed up against his throat. She could only surprise someone with that trick once, but they also quickly learned the lesson of never underestimating an old woman with gray hair. She pressed a little harder, and Robert tilted his head up to try to relieve the pressure.

“There’s someone out here waiting for us. When she gets here, you’re going to invite her in. Got it?” He nodded. “Good. Because if you don’t invite her in of your own free will, she’ll find a way to get herself invited anyway. It’ll be a lot easier if…” His eyes flicked away from her to somewhere over her shoulder. She pressed her hairstick against his throat a little bit harder as she turned to watch Drusilla saunter out of the shadows and into the light. It was a relief to feel the warning against just _one_ vampire, a clear indication of how bad her night was going. “Ah, here she is. I assume an educated young man such as yourself knows who this is.”

“Please don’t eat me,” he moaned.

“I’ve no want to,” she caroled, walking in closer. “No desire to sully myself with such nastiness. Not even fit enough to waste on leeches.” Buffy felt Robert go rigid against her arm. “You can offer far more than sustenance.”

He looked at Buffy out of the corners of his eyes without moving his head. “What does…”

“Invite her in, you dolt.”

“What, so I invite her in and_ then_ she eats me?”

Drusilla clucked at Robert, shaking her head. “Scared little boy isn’t trying to listen. Not without the Generalissima’s by-your-leave.” She shivered and took another step towards Robert, all up in his personal space. “Now, be a dear and invite me in.”

His eyes flicked from Buffy to Drusilla and back. “Why her?” he managed to get out. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because she’s the only person I can trust to be untrustworthy and she’s the_ one_ person I know who hasn’t lied to me yet. Now _invite her in _and tell us _everything _that’s going on here.” All traces of sweetness were gone. There was only The Slayer, capital T, capital S, coming out of her mouth: commander of armies, Closer of the Sunnydale Hellmouth, the one with whom you do not mess.

“Every…every – oh.” It took a moment for the truth to dawn on him. “Oh, my God, Ms. Summers, you mean nobody’s told you anything?”

“As a matter of fact, no. I bluffed my way in here tonight by offering to help carry the ice cream because I had one too many people lie to me _on top of_ kidnapping people I love and abducting scads of vampires for God knows what warped mission you’re enacting here.”

“If you don’t know what we’re doing how do you know it’s tonight?”

“I’ve got friends in low places,” she said, Drusilla’s mad laughter sounding though the parking lot.

“Tonight’s all passed. It’s already come time for your friends. Invite me in before it’s too late for us all.” Drusilla reached out to run her hands through his hair, and her fingertips down across his cheeks, tracing a path that a tear followed immediately. “Sweet little boy’s full of misgivings and forked paths. Give us a look, pet. I’ll show you what’s yet to come. All you rich fools. This very night, all you’ve prepared. Let me show you.”

“A look…” Robert trailed off as Drusilla stared deep into his eyes. Something passed between them, and he gasped and rushed out, “Yes, I invite you in, you can come into my house, get inside!” 

Buffy pulled the hairstick away from his throat and sped after Drusilla, Robert following after, as they ran through the building. Drusilla practically flew down the dark hallways, guided by whatever visions she’d managed to grab onto and use to tell her where to go. She ran this way, that way, turning one corner and another, and they weren’t on their way back to the main lookout point.

_Where is she taking – is this the way to the spellcasting – _

Buffy and Robert nearly ran into Drusilla when she came to a complete stop, stone-still in the middle of the narrow sterile science hallway. They took a step back from her. Buffy asked, “Drusilla?”

Wrong question: she screeched out, “No!”

Before Buffy or Robert could ask for any follow-up, Buffy felt the hairs on her neck and arms rise. Her eardrums started to ache from the subsonic hum suddenly coming from everywhere.

Robert put his hand flat against the wall, looked at the ceiling. “Do you feel that?”

Buffy didn’t need to answer. Drusilla wailed again, and a second later, they_ all_ felt it.

No time to savor the sensation of an earthquake without the ground shifting or the feeling of thunder without the lightning. No time to think about the ripple that ran through the air and made everything look like they were watching the world through clear, icy fire. There was only enough time to run after Drusilla, who was still crying out her distress, run towards the warning alarms, run towards the danger. Just enough brain space left to think,_ My knees are going to hate me tomorrow, _and to think, _Towards the danger is where a Slayer goes, _and then see Drusilla pull her hands back and hiss at a door handle.

“Holy water,” Robert explained, panting slightly. “Keeps them in from both sides.”

“Oh, you’re all just_ full_ of good ideas here,” Buffy quipped, and kicked the door off its hinges.

“It was unlocked,” Robert said, but she wasn’t listening.

All the vampires turned to look at Buffy. All she could do was stare and back up against the wall as they rushed towards her.

“I loved him but I was so hungry –”

“He made me eat her, he forced me, he turned me and forced me so one of us would live, please –”

“Ninety-seven, ninety-seven, I haven’t touched a human in years but all their faces, I remember all their faces –”

“Eighteen in one night, please, we made a game of it, a _game _–”

“My grandchildren, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know, it was so long, I’m_ begging_ you –”

“Please, Slayer, please –”

“Slayer –”

“Slayer –”

“Slayer –”

The vampires were rushing towards her, falling over each other to get to her, their words crashing together to a solid wall of sound. Their hands on her, eyes wild, on their feet and on their knees, reaching out to her. She tried to look around and couldn’t make out any of them, couldn’t see who she was talking to or who was in front of her. She tried to speak and none of her words carried through the sounds.

Hands were on her legs and Buffy tried to push them back. Hands were on her arms and she tried to push them away. Hands were on her chest and voices were screaming for holy water, for stakes, sunlight, her hands, something, anything, _Slayer please Slayer please Slayer –_

Buffy deliberately hadn’t put in her hearing aids earlier, just in case. In case of what, she hadn’t known. She’d had a feeling, though, and she hadn’t lived this long not trusting those feelings. Out came the ultrasonic whistle, and Drusilla clamped her hands over her ears as Buffy put it to her lips and blew: loud, and hard, and sudden, painful for everyone. She could register some of it in her jaw, a buzzing sensation and the feeling of there being something in the air just beyond the edges of what she could hear.

All the vampires in the room could hear it perfectly well, clamping their hands over their ears and screaming in pain, which was a step up from screaming out to die. Buffy kept blowing the whistle, drawing out more and more air, while the vampires were falling to the floor. She’d wanted to snap them out of their hysteria, the shock and piercing noise taking them out of their own misery through new pain, making the vampires stop and, for the most part, drop where they were. Anyone in that kind of state needed to hear someone else screaming. This was the best way she could manage to scream back at them. And scream she did, until she’d exhausted all the air she had in her lungs and had to finally stop to take in a breath.

Buffy looked out over the room. All the vampires were hunched over or on the floor, even Drusilla, whimpering in emotional pain and auditory incapacitation, and nobody was bum-rushing her anymore. She’d needed to give the vampires space so they wouldn’t fall into further collective panic and grief, and she’d done that. She’d also given herself the time and space to figure out what was happening. 

“Okay,” Buffy announced in her best_ I’m An Adult Ask Me How _voice. “_Okay_. Are we all done? Good.” She could see a few vampires getting up, and their hands were on other vampires, offering all the cold comfort they could. Buffy looked up at the window, where there were only seven faces staring down in abject horror. She looked at Robert, who was flat against the wall, looking on the scene with frozen dread. All the night’s suppressed anger and worry spilled out when she asked, “You want to tell me _exactly_ what happened here tonight?”

He swallowed and wiped his face. “It worked.”


	9. cities built to store and sell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Convenient Parking" as covered by Sun Kil Moon.

What ‘it’ was had been done with the best intentions.

Of which there were always,_ always_ too many. 

The whole thing started when Millicent Vargas needed to pick a topic for her PhD dissertation. Origins of most definitely innocent type, beginnings most definitely of the humble variety: all she’d wanted was a subject she could write about and not get bored with after twenty pages. It was why she’d gone for a doctorate in applied magical theory instead of an apprenticeship at a local magical guild. Like the difference between a degree in electrical engineering and being an electrician. And once she was done, all defended and titled, there’d be a whole lot more opportunities open to her. That was the hope fueling her nights. That was why she’d settled on demonic curses throughout the ages, with a focus on transformation and transitional states as both punishment and reward. Not curses made by demons. Curses made_ to_ demons. It seemed generalist enough she wouldn’t have any trouble finding citation and also specific enough she could say something new about the topic. The ideal balance, so often hoped for, so rarely achieved.

Three months into research with only an outline and eleven pages of handwritten notes to show for herself, Millicent was nearly ready to throw it all in and buy herself a tool belt. Metaphorically speaking. Then she flipped the library’s reference copy of _Gathering the Magic: Richard Garfield’s Compendium of Codices and Artifacts_ open to a random page and her eyes settled on the entry about spirit vaults. Once there, she didn’t look away. The information wasn’t the one data point she needed to tie everything together and send her on her thesising way. It was more that she’d been a philosophy major in college, and the book’s descriptions regarding the question of direct reprisal versus the possibility of repentance hit her where she lived.

She went back the next day with additional sources and citations for cross-referencing and further research purposes. A thought had come to her the night before, clear and perfect, and because it was still the_ same_ thought the next morning, Millicent had known it was worth looking into.

The thought being, _Why don’t we go back to doing that?_

The Kalderash had been pretty much wiped off the face of the earth near the end of the nineteenth century. Not much survived of them, though thanks to a handful of researchers and early technopagans at the end of the twentieth century, their rites and rituals were still known to the world.

Their rites and rituals, and one lone souled vampire.

Millicent read the two-and-a-half-page entry on spirit vaults over and over. Memorized the three short paragraphs about the Kalderash. Gone back to her old research and took a good old-fashioned wikiwalk through the campus library’s research databases and journal subscriptions. After four mad, fevered weeks of almost no sleep as the idea worked its way through her head, she’d managed to get enough sources to triangulate the concept she wanted to be absolutely certain of before she took it to anyone else.

Angelus was not the first vampire ensouled by the Kalderash. Not by a long shot. A ritual that complex and precise and energy-intensive couldn’t be thrown together on the spur of a vengeful moment. Not when the clan had been in full mourning for their most beloved daughter. It had been developed, refined, and perfected well before then. The ultimate weapon against the dead, soulless creatures of the night; against that which feasted on pure life, corrupting the patterns and cycles of the world.

He was not the only vampire forced to bear the burden of a soul. Angel was the last and only surviving one of an impressive curse lineage that went back as far as there had been a Kalderash clan. Millicent charted descriptions of vampires deliberately seeking out Slayers or holy men and offering themselves as easy kills, willingly accepting a stake or a beheading, or even voluntarily walking out into the morning sunshine. She checked those against notable Romani massacres and spree kills and murders. The instances went beyond coincidence into pattern, then beyond pattern into sequence, and finally beyond sequence into irrefutable evidence that the Kalderash had been performing the soul restoration ritual for centuries. Until they ran afoul of the Whirlwind.

Despite all modern technological advances, from shock collars to behavioral modification chips to even more advanced treatments, none of it was a proven or suitable way to force change into a vampire. Willing or otherwise. Except maybe it didn’t have to be modern.

What if someone used magic to achieve that change?

What if a vampire got its soul back?

If what had been lost during the transformation from human to vampire was returned,_ not_ as punishment but instead a means and a way for that vampire to find its way back towards humanity, could that vampire achieve a state of grace? Could they willingly seek redemption, as Angel himself had been throughout the last century? Could they integrate into human society, as Spike had? Would it be possible that an unknown vampire could exceed their accomplishments?

It’d be the single greatest thing that could be done for the world’s remaining vampires. Rip their monstrosity away. Pull every vampire back into the world in a way they’d never be able to manage on their own. They were living in nests and working with humans in ways that hadn’t been possible until a few decades ago. Yet the fact remained they were still soulless monsters who’d committed vile and heinous acts and didn’t feel particularly regretful about having done so. Vampires were still more than capable of hurting people, and everyone knew it. 

And there wasn’t any way for them to become better while they could hurt people.

Millicent knew she’d found a way to stop vampires from hurting anyone anymore.

Once she knew that, once she was _clear_ on that, the rest of it fell into place. Millicent begged an extension from the thesis committee and threw a handful of typed, numbered pages at her advisor to make it look like she was working. Once she had her academic decoy ducks sorted, she began reaching out to others. People Millicent knew could be trusted. Her former roommate she’d known since their freshman year of college. A friend of a friend who was one of the local Slayers. Anyone she knew would understand her work. One person at a time. Moving carefully, slowly, and methodically. Making sure all the pieces were in place. Getting a home base, literally, for the whole operation. Collecting the necessary materials for the Ritual of Restoration: herbs, candles, small rocks, a captive vampire, the properly slaughtered animal bones, and finally, the Orb of Thesulah. 

Testing it out.

Succeeding in restoring the vampire’s soul, which wasn’t a surprise because the group had done the damn research and knew what they were doing.

That the vampire was a gibbering wreck and a shell of its former self didn’t point to any failure on their part. Millicent knew it was a question of transition. That could be dealt with after the next step, which was figuring out how to scale up the spell.

Orbs of Thesulah weren’t that hard to come by, except buying the number they’d need would draw too much attention. One vampire wasn’t proof of concept. They’d need at least fifty for that. Everybody could pitch in and buy a few orbs, but it’d leave the kind of paper trail that would point to an uptick in general interest in them, which would bring about its own sort of scrutiny. Thankfully, the orbs weren’t all that hard to make – after all, the Kalderash had used them fairly regularly back before online shopping and hardware stores had been invented, and the enchantment spell was easy enough to perform. All anyone needed for the orbs themselves was some high-grade rose quartz and a qualified lapidarist.

It turned out all anyone needed to successfully purchase a couple thousand pounds of high-grade rose quartz was a landscaping supply website and a debit card.

When she’d gotten the order and the boulder, the lapidarist had asked Millicent if the tiny crystal balls were going to be wedding party favors. Then she’d laughed and gotten on with her job.

Casting a soul into one vampire was tough, but doable, with clear instructions. Scaling it up to two, to start, meant casting a soul into_ another_ vampire to measure all the forces and energies to see where the work needed to be done, then testing those principles out on two at once.

It went off without a hitch.

Granted, the second set of vampires were gibbering wrecks begging to be dusted, yet by that point, the first two vampire had adjusted pretty well after a few weeks and were managing to get down some haema every couple of days. They’d also grown much more responsive to outside stimuli. What was more surprising than the time needed to fully adjust was watching those first two helping the new ones work through the worst of it, and how that seemed to help_ all_ of them adjust much faster than when they’d given them souls one by one.

It wasn’t just the introduction of the soul into an individual that wasn’t used to one anymore that made for trouble during the transition phase. There was also a social aspect to a successful adjustment, which nobody, not even Millicent, had seen coming. Since 2010, after the two-year mass extinction campaign spearheaded by an alliance of Slayers, demons, magical practitioners, and assorted ordinary humans was finally called to a halt with over seventy percent of the total global population gone, most vampires lived in nests. They had adapted fairly well to social behaviors after centuries of isolation and solitude as their primary nature. It was still easy to forget that vampires had once been human, and humans did better with other humans around. It appeared that was true for vampires as well.

Vampires new to walking around with souls in them needed vampires _old_ to walking around with souls in them.

The news that Buffy Summers would speak at graduation put one of the old souled vampires into position. She never traveled anywhere without Spike, so that’d make for an easier grab than if a couple of them had to travel up to Sebastopol.

Two weeks later, completely independently, Angel accepted the invitation to participate in the art show Doris was coordinating for a few months down the line. If he hadn’t accepted, they would’ve needed to go down to San Diego and grab him there.

Getting enough vampires for the big blowout and to show off what they were doing was about as simple as getting all the orbs. Vampires were easy to catch during the day, especially since they lived in nests. Lani had commented that if they were still solitary creatures, this could’ve taken months.

Careful planning, a couple of vans, some weapons, and the right addresses, and they could grab eight to twelve vampires at once from a single nest. Planning it this way had the beneficial side effect of _no news is good news: _gossip couldn’t travel up or down the grapevine if there wasn’t anyone left to spread it. Even so, better to grab all the vampires as close to the deadline as they could. No reason to have a whole bunch of vampires kept in close quarters for so long. Two weeks, maybe three, although even that was pushing it.

The problem hadn’t come with the seizing itself, or the attrition rate during the early runs before they’d figured out the most efficient process, or with making sure they’d hit all the nests in the whole East Bay region. The problem surfaced during their first nest raid: when, after all the vampires had been captured, contained, and loaded up, Tobias had asked,_ what about the rats?_

Everyone agreed he had a point. They couldn’t leave a full breeding colony of domestic rats to starve without anything taking care of them. They couldn’t set all of them free into the urban environment where they wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves and possibly lead to infestations and wildlife issues. Animal adoption agencies would notice a sudden large influx and start asking questions. So they did the only thing they could do, and took the rats with them. With each nest captured, Robert set up the rescued breeding colony in his new house, and a few of the more social ones even got taken home as pets.

Once the time came, catching Angel had been a reasonably straightforward operation.

Spike was trickier: electricity just made him fight back harder. They’d managed eventually.

Caging him in with Angel seemed to soothe them both, so that was good. Not so good was that Buffy kept trying to get in touch with him. He’d argued that silence would be more suspicious than anything he could tell her and dictated a couple of short text messages that got her to stop trying to contact him, which made for one less thing to worry about.

The whole thing was planned to go down on graduation day, on the grounds that it’d be the day of the least possible attention and scrutiny. Everyone else on campus would be busy and otherwise occupied, and they could perform the ritual in peace. The spell was scaled up an order of magnitude to where they’d need sixteen dedicated spellcasters, and the remaining seven individuals would stand by in case of emergency. Come the following Monday, all the vampires would have had time to adjust, and they’d be able to show Millicent’s vision to the world. A better world. A gentler world.

Then Buffy Summers showed up.

Nobody was quite sure who’d called her – Lani had been working to keep her occupied and distracted – though when she arrived with Natalie after the ice cream run, she was all smiles and eagerness, ready to see what was happening. Happy to be there and well ahead of schedule.

It wasn’t like the Ritual of Restoration took a long time to perform. A while to set up, yes, but the actual casting of it could be done in under ten minutes.

Which was why they’d started eighteen hours early and without Buffy. That way, they’d have something ready to show her as soon as she got back.


	10. and the bells will ring and the crowd will roar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Yallah" by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.

Thankfully, the League already knew something was wrong when Buffy called. They just needed her to fill in the details. When the mass ensoulment spell went off, the local League office had gotten near-simultaneous reports from all the regional observation stations as far out as the Farallones and Mount Diablo – that being the tip-off it wasn’t some drunken teenagers summoning demons in a frat house as a pre-graduation prank like what happened in most years.

“Send everyone you can spare. Whatever’s happened needs to stay _contained. _I don’t know if there’s any contamination yet or if –”

“Already called in squads from across the state,” Samina assured her. “Every practicing witch and magician’s heading over or they’re already working on stabilizing this thing. We’ve got no idea what to do to get it fixed, but if we can’t, we can at least stop it from getting worse.”

“Okay, that’s not so bad, comparatively, which, still not of the good, but workable. We can work with that. All right.” Buffy pounded her fist against the wall and hung her head. “Nothing more we can do, so on that note, when can you get us out of here?”

“Not long. There’s a couple vans coming your way.”

“A couple of vans isn’t going to cut it for everyone we’ve got to move.”

“You said there were twenty-three people.”

_God give me strength._ “Twenty-three would-be conspirators plus the_ entire_ remaining vampire population of the East Bay. Rounding up, we’ll need_ at least_ three hundred seats. Maybe more, I didn’t get an accurate head count.” All those bodies bowing down to her, reaching out to her, the naked desperation for her to end them – “I don’t care who you have to requisition the vehicles from, army, navy, Muni, but we’ve got a lot of souls to move and not much time before sunrise and we’re not going to be safe staying here. _Souls_. You hear me?”

“There’s only a couple sunproofed –”

“Tinfoil and duct-tape the windows and throw in some blankets and that’ll be enough sun protection for a fast evacuation,” Buffy ground out. “You got that?” Samina managed to stammer out that she did. “Good. Keep the channels open and let me know when we’re all of us getting out of here.” Buffy hung up and took a moment to rub her eyes. The windowless office she’d ducked into had a door she’d locked behind her, which was great for the momentary illusion of privacy. She took a deep breath in the dark, savoring the moment of the roller coaster hitting the peak the second before started plummeting, and went back out to see what else was happening.

The only person in the main observation area was Millicent, who was curled up on a couch and prying the lid off a pint of ice cream. It was a move of such utter balls of titanium that the sheer audacity of it was the only reason Buffy didn’t walk over and grab it out of her hands. Instead, she just strode over, looming as best she could, and demanded, “Excuse me, what the_ hell_ are you doing?”

“Having some ice cream,” Millicent replied, picking up a plastic red spoon.

“Nuh-uh. Sorry, but we need all hands on deck for this. We’ve got –”

“No, no, I’m sorry. I’m the one who’s sorry here.” She had a thin face with low cheeks, pale blonde hair, and sounded about three words away from crying. “I’m the one who’s only now found out my big hopeful plan to help make the world a better place just blew up and –”

“Your _what?”_ Buffy’s voice rose with her growing irritation.

“My whole grand plan just blew up, pretty much literally, and we don’t know what the hell, again, literally, _hell, _ is going to happen to anyone here, much less the city, the entire state of California –” 

“Oh, and _now_ you’re thinking about what might happen from all this?”

“Look, we’re probably about ten minutes away from evacuating the entire city, this is my life’s work and ambitions all down the drain, I don’t know what sort of punishments I’m going to have to live through when it’s all done so let me take these ten minutes for some pralines and _fucking _cream, please!” Millicent took a deep breath and swept some hair behind her ear. “Okay. Yelling at you, I’ll apologize for. But I’m still going to eat this ice cream.”

Buffy knew how easy it would be to pick up Millicent by the throat and hurl her through the nearest available wall. She also knew there were more pressing things to worry about than a little girl eating ice cream. “No, you’ve made a convincing argument. You eat that.” Buffy pushed all the chipper she could muster into her voice and didn’t bother to mask the sarcasm. “You sit right there and eat your ice cream and don’t move until I say so.”

Millicent spitefully took a bite of ice cream. Thirty seconds earlier, Buffy wouldn’t have thought it was possible to eat ice cream with any amount of spite. The night was becoming a learning experience in all sorts of ways. 

Leaving Millicent to her comfort food, Buffy went to see how everyone else was doing. The humans were all pretty much fine, packing up their stuff and preparing to endure whatever happened to them next. The vampires, not so much. After she’d blown the whistle on them, they’d quieted down enough for her to learn it’d only been a third of them who’d come rushing at her begging for the release of the nothingness that came at the end of their existence. There’d been another third trying their best to hold those others back and keep them calm to a fair degree of success.

It was the last third that was the real cause of concern. They hadn’t come rushing at her, and they hadn’t helped their fellow vamps who’d gone into panic mode. This group wasn’t moving at all. They were slumped against walls, sitting on the floor, lying where they’d fallen when the curse hit, lost so deep inside their heads nothing was getting out.

Buffy watched a young-looking Asian female vampire crouch down to where another, older-seeming, white female one was lying flat on her back. The first vampire gently pulled the second one up to a sitting position, then placed her arms around the other’s shoulders, getting the second onto her feet. Neither of them spoke, the second too traumatized to manage words as she was guided along, being moved somewhere better than the middle of the empty round room.

Angel and Spike, with a few other vampires, had set up a little rat-distribution operation. It consisted of walking around with big plastic buckets full of squeaking, chirping live rats, and handing them out to any vampire who needed something to eat. Since a mass feeding would take too long to set up, this seemed the best way to help the greatest number of vampires possible in what little time they had. There wasn’t any way for Spike and Angel to feasibly sit down with everyone having a hard time and give them the personal support and comfort they needed to figure out how to bear the weight of a new soul. Practical solutions only. No matter how much this solution made Buffy want to turn away. Give everyone something to eat. A bit of life to keep them going.

Buffy looked at a dark-skinned vampire with a mane of dreadlocks slumped down against a wall, holding a rat in his hands and letting it run over his fingers again and again. He stared at it and let it jump down onto his knees, where it began grooming itself. He looked up at her, eyes open and storming. “I can’t,” he croaked. “I can’t. I want to, I know what it is, I know what I’m supposed to do, but I can’t. I know what it’s for, and I’ve done it a hundred times already and I think about_ eating_ it when I’ve eaten so many…” He pressed a hand against his mouth and his words came out in a high whine. “It doesn’t have any idea. It doesn’t know. And I can’t. It’s all so new and it hurts so much and I’m hungry and I know a rat’s nothing but I _can’t…._”

One of the bucket-carrying vampires looked up from where she stood, a couple of people away. She set her bucket on the floor, walked back over, and picked up the rat, petting it gently against her chest. Then, quick and painlessly, she snapped its neck and handed it back.

“Thank you,” he whispered to her, fangs dropping, and he swallowed down the scant amount of real live blood with a look of shattered joy. “Thank you,” he whispered again, cradling the tiny dead body against his chest.

Buffy looked at the vampire. She had a white, round, very motherly face, with brown hair twisted into a messy bun. She was about as tall as Drusilla and pulled herself up every inch of it.

“Buffy Summers,” she said with reluctant reverence.

“Yes,” Buffy replied.

“I’m not bowing to you.” She had a flat American accent, which didn’t necessarily say anything about where she was from.

“I’m fine with that,” Buffy told her.

“You want me to call you Buffy, Ms. Summers, something else?” She spoke in an even, measured tone that Buffy recognized way too well from personal experience with far too many apocalypses.

“Buffy’s fine.”

“All right, then.” The vampire didn’t even nod. Just stayed standing, looking down at Buffy and not breaking eye contact.

“And you?”

“Gerhard.”

“Gerhard…” Buffy’s voice trailed off, hoping the vampire would fill in the empty space and help her figure out why it sounded almost familiar. When she didn’t, Buffy tried again. “Gerhard, and? Last name, first name?”

“Gerhard,” Gerhard repeated.

“Okay. Just one name, kicking it old school. Respect. Good to meet you, Gerhard, we’re going to be on the move soon so let’s start getting everyone mobilized and ready.”

“Where are they taking us?”

She’d had enough of bluffing and lying for the night. “I don’t know.”

Gerhard nodded slowly, shrugged, and went back to rat distribution and collection.

Four steps away, the name hit her. She whipped her head around and stared back at Gerhard, offering out seconds on rats now that everyone had had their firsts. Nobody besides Gerhard’s own nest had cared she’d gone missing one night. Other nests had asked around, tried to learn, and they hadn’t found anything because Millicent’s people had gotten their hands on her and turned her into test subject number one. No wonder Gerhard was handling herself so well. She’d had enough time to bear through the worst of it.

The vampires had slowly spread out through the corridors, and Buffy couldn’t blame them for wanting out of the room. She walked along, ignoring the looks she got, until she found Spike. With Drusilla, which, okay. When everything had quieted down enough for the long-estranged family members to greet each other, Spike had been polite, almost shy, until Drusilla silently reached out and touched his cheek. Then he’d smiled and wrapped his arms around her. Angel had tried to say something, only for Drusilla to pull away from Spike long enough to glare at him and say_ I’m not here for you yet _before going back to their silent embrace. Buffy couldn’t really blame them. It was the first time they’d seen each other in fifty-nine years, and with about the same level of badness to the surrounding circumstances. If she kept meeting Spike like this, she wouldn’t want to let go of him right away, either.

Besides, he’d kissed Buffy first.

Right now, Drusilla and Spike were both on rat duty, collecting the tiny bodies into fresh buckets for safe disposal. She couldn’t hear them talking, though she could see their faces and mouths moving, words clearly being exchanged. Drusilla reached out and ran her hand over Spike’s head and ruffled his curls, making him smile, and Buffy didn’t let the sharp warmth in her chest stop her in her tracks. Again, an unblameable action, even if it was one that made her press her lips between her teeth. His were a most rufflable set of curls.

“Hey,” she interrupted, and the two of them turned to face her. “Felicity’s coordinating where everyone’s going to go, and I want us all to be ready when they’re here to pick us up. Can you start marshalling the troops, get us all on the same page?”

“Got it, pet,” Spike said, still with a faint smile. “Which way are we heading?”

“The front door.”

“That’ll be fun. They took us in through the delivery entrance out back.” The lightness of his tone made Buffy’s stomach flip. Robert would’ve been there, inviting all the vampires in one by one, and he’d never once thought about what he was doing. “You know, in through the out door.”

“Yeah,” she replied, not knowing exactly and too busy to be curious. “Anyway, make sure everyone knows. I’m going to find Angel, see what he’s busy with and get him on this too.”

“As soon as he’s done playing,” Drusilla noted, and the two of them went back to rat collection. 

Buffy found Angel slumped down on the floor, holding a silent male vampire to his chest, one arm around the other’s shoulders and pressing his face against Angel’s chest. Angel wasn’t saying anything, just anchoring the other vampire into the world. At least when there was sobbing, there was a sign someone was still home. When Buffy told them both about the preliminary evacuation plan, they both nodded in acknowledgment. It was a start.

Five Muni buses showed up about forty minutes later. The buses were accompanied by three vans of assorted Slayers, Watchers, witches, magicians, university faculty and security, plus a couple city council members and national park rangers for good measure. Samina had given Buffy enough notice to get everyone outside so they’d be able to get going away from the ALS building as soon as they could. Twenty-three humans clustered together like scared penguins, grasping onto boxes of their stuff and pulling suitcases of extra magical supplies that’d likely get confiscated as soon as they were in official custody. Three hundred forty-nine vampires – three hundred fifty-two with Angel, Drusilla, and Spike hanging around with them – with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the shoes on their feet, doing their best to stay upright either on their own or with the help of those around them. And then there was Buffy, a nation unto herself, who’d started the out night hoping to find Spike and was wrapping it up hoping she hadn’t been at ground zero of another apocalypse.

When they’d all stepped outside, and finally been able to see the sky, Angel had taken in the aurora-borealis-meets-Van-Gogh view, turned to Doris, and quietly deadpanned, “Will you look at that.”

“Everyone present and accounted for,” Buffy told Vacha, who was as big a person up close as he’d sounded over the phone. He nodded from about a foot and a half above Buffy’s head.

“Okay!” Vacha shouted. “All humans over this way!” They looked around at each other, confused at being singled out, and slowly began to approach. “All of you, you’re coming with me, so let’s get –”

“Excuse me,” Millicent asked, “where are we going?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re taking us somewhere that’s not here.” She clasped her hands together in front, the model of demure. “Somewhere I don’t know where it’s going to be, and I’d like to know where that is.”

Vacha stared down at her. “Treasure Island. Why?”

“Oh, that’s good!” Millicent exclaimed. “Very good. A military station. It’s smart of you to put us somewhere you can keep an eye on us and make sure we’re behaving well. And the vampires?” Vacha didn’t answer. “The vampires,” she pressed. “Where are they going?”

“Someplace else. Don’t worry, we’ve got people on site doing the necessary conversions so they’ll –”

“I’m sorry but that doesn’t work for me.” Buffy did a double-take. Millicent kept smiling. “I know it’s a big thing to have to change, especially after all the work I’m sure you put in to making everything ready for us on Treasure Island and for them wherever they’re going, except you’re going to have to send us both to the same place. So either they’re coming to Treasure Island with us or we’re going wherever they’re being sent off to.”

Vacha stared down with wide, furious eyes. “You are _not _in a position to be making requests.” He took a step closer to her. “Get on the bus.”

“I’m not making a request.” She wasn’t sounding three words away from crying anymore, having gone to three words away from demanding Vacha’s head on a pike. Her body was shaking, and she didn’t look away. “I know I’m responsible for everything that happened tonight, I don’t know the full extent of what I’ve done, but I know that these vampires, all of them, they’re my responsibility, and I need to know they’re going to be kept safe and I need to know everything that’s going to happen to them.”

Millicent was breathing furiously out of her nose, snorting like a bull before a matador. “You’re probably smart not to trust me after what I’ve tried to do, but that doesn’t erase the fact that they’re all in this position because of what I did, and what I need to do is look after them until we’ve got this whole mess sorted out, and I’m not leaving them. We’re not leaving them. You’re sending all of us, and I mean _all_ of us, to the same place and I don’t care where that is as long as you don’t take them away where I won’t be able to know what’s happening to them. So where is it you’re sending us? All of us.”

Buffy hadn’t seen such a good weaponized white woman in years and had to bite her tongue to keep from smiling. Vacha just glared. He took a breath, and Buffy cut in, “No, what she said. Everyone goes together. Your boss has a problem with it, tell him to take it up with me.”

His boss didn’t. Her boss might, and that was a problem for another morning. Right now, the humans were all put together on one bus, the vampires on the others, and they’d soon be off to the Berkeley Marina and Angel Island. The humans talked at a steady loudness level, Buffy catching a few words here and there as they walked past. They glanced around, looking at the parking lot and their former headquarters, holding their boxes carefully and tossing their suitcases up the steps ahead of them. 

The vampires walked quietly, not putting up any fight or protest or resistance, stumbling when someone pushed or prodded them to move faster. No hissing, no roaring, no showing of fangs. Arms around each other to make sure everyone left on their feet. No looking back at the Advanced Light Source building that was, ironically enough, still covered with shimmering air, visible even in the dark. They climbed into buses with hastily spray-painted windows, and Buffy lashed out to grab Spike’s arm as he, Drusilla, and Angel moved with the rest.

“You don’t need to go with them,” she said.

Spike jerked his head around to look at her with a quiet, simmering anger: _how dare you say that. _ He gently pulled himself away, and went back to the group, climbing up into the bus. Buffy didn’t have a choice. She followed him on. She would always follow him.

Angel was in the back row, guarding the exit door. Spike sat in the middle of the bus and immediately started talking to the vampires around him, seeing how they were doing, checking up on them. Drusilla picked a window seat and leaned her head against the glass, and Buffy stayed up front to watch the road. The driver did a double-take, and to her credit, she didn’t tell Buffy to go find a seat in the back. She just started driving. _Four for you, Ms. Bus Driver, you go, four for you. _

From the front, Buffy watched the city unfold. She’d seen mass evacuations a few times in her life, and for the most part, same show, different day. At least in California, people had the presence of mind to be aware of the potential for evacuation-scale disasters and could prepare and react accordingly. The main issue, as usual, was the mass scale of moving so many people in the same direction all at once. Add that to people being grumpy and grouchy for having been woken up in the middle of the night, and it was amazing that traffic was moving as fast as it was. There were Slayers and Watchers and local cops and people in uniforms. She didn’t know how to differentiate between all of them. She just knew enough to tell was there was_ plenty_ of military.

Buffy almost expected the buildings and houses they passed to be wrecked – flattened, or fallen down, some sign of the damage and destruction. Magic didn’t always work like that. She just thought it would’ve helped to see something besides the oil painted night sky.

The bus stopped to let a few civilian cars drive past. When they were past, the driver moved to get going again, then stopped when a deer crossed the road in front of the bus. She was about to honk the horn and get it to move when it looked right at her and Buffy. The deer was close enough Buffy could see all – yes, all three of its eyes reflecting the headlights. It blinked them one at a time, one, two, three. Then it looked away and trotted off back into the night.

“That’s not a good sign, is it,” the driver said.

“Not that I know of,” Buffy replied.

It looked like the rest of Berkeley was being directed out to Treasure Island. Buffy didn’t exactly envy them. She’d been part of coordination and relief efforts before, on both sides, and the logistics were a nightmare for all involved. Still, at least they could drive to where they were going.

When the bus driver pulled up at the marina, the requisitioned ferry was waiting for them. More security, more park rangers, none of whom knew what to make of the fact that they’d be transporting humans, too, except it made the whole thing more real to them and they couldn’t block out the reality of what they were doing any more. The ferry was big enough it’d only take one trip to transport everyone – a small favor Buffy would take with thanks at this point. Her phone buzzed and she turned away from the shuffling crowd to give Samina a brief status update that she had to cut short when someone began shouting.

“You’re shitting me with this!” The vampire pushed away from his friend’s support around his waist. One of the catatonics, a young-looking Asian man, he’d been shuffling along and somehow this was enough to register and get him out of his head and back into the world. Loudly. “You are_ fucking_ shitting me with this, no goddamn way, I went through that place in nineteen-sixteen and you’re not sending me back to that shit heap!”

“Shen, look, we’re not –”

“No!” He shouted, shoving at the vampires around him. Buffy stepped closer to get a better view. “No, send me off to fucking Alcatraz if you’re going to send me to a goddamn holding cell just for _being_ here, just for them doing this to us, not that shit heap again!”

“This isn’t a punishment,” Angel said, cutting through the noise and sounds. It always impressed her how he could do that. “This is temporary until it’s –”

“No fucking shit it’s temporary!” Shen spun around, everyone trying to back away from him. “They’re gonna find another place to send us soon, they’re gonna move us along, they’ll send out the forms and the papers and it’ll all get done except it never fucking does. They’re sticking us in a fucking_ detention center_ and they’re going to –”

“We’re not, okay?” Millicent shouted. “We’re not going to forget about you. We’re not sure what to do so we’re trying to make sure you’re all safe. You understand that? We _want _you safe. I want you safe.”

Shen growled, fangs dropping and eyes bursting into gold. The rangers and security people all dropped to battle stance, hands reaching for their weapons. “_Safe, _ of course, _you _want us safe! Why would _you_ want anything else for us?” He snarled, fangs glinting from the marina’s lamps, and out came the guns. “Why the fuck would you want us safe for ourselves? Safe for you, safe for everyone else, you don’t give a_ shit_ about us, you just want –” He roared, Spike pinning his arms back with one hand, holding him immobile with another arm wrapped around his chest. 

“We get it, mate,” Spike hissed. “Now give it a rest ’till we get there.”

“I won’t give it a goddamn rest until humans come up with some new fucking ideas!” Shen shouted something in Chinese that made Spike smirk. “I won’t give it a _fucking _rest until she says what she did!”

“I know what I did,” Millicent choked out. Buffy had been wrong about her. She’d been five words away from crying, not three. Her voice kept cracking, and she kept talking through the tears. “I know, and I’m_ sorry_. I need to make it right by you, and I don’t know _how _to do that. And I_ can’t_ do that if you aren’t kept safe for yourselves. From us, from_ everyone. _ We need to make sure you’re all safe. _All _of you.”

Buffy stepped forward. “I know it’s a shitty thing to have to go back to a place like that when you thought you’d never have to see it again.” she said. The Slayer talking got his attention. Everyone’s attention, really, but she focused on Shen. She echoed his language as best she could, hoping it’d do the trick. It seemed to: he didn’t put his fangs away, though he was really listening now. “Believe me, if we knew how to fix this, right this goddamn second, we would.” It was a relief to let her anger out into her voice. “So until we do, this is the best of a bad situation. We’re sorry it’s this way.” She fixed her gaze on his bright eyes, letting him know she had the situation as under control as she could get it. “Now, can you please take that for what it is?”

Shen stared at her, an innocent expression of open confusion made horrifying through his visage – the way his pupils tracked her and how his tongue ran over his teeth. Confusion and a lack of comprehension, and Buffy worried he was slipping back to catatonia.

Then he spat at her.

His aim was too far off to make a hit, but that didn’t much matter, not when every vampire roared in fury and Shen screamed in pain as Spike snapped _something_ in his back that made him go limp in his arms and Gerhard was right there with a hand clamped over his mouth before Buffy could even twitch.

“How’s about we _don’t_ antagonize the few nice humans trying to make sure we all get through this,” Gerhard ground out, tightening her fingers. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t be mad at the world right now. Just a polite suggestion that maybe _not_ making things worse for the rest of us would be a good idea to keep in mind.”

Shen’s eyes went brown and he kept glaring. “You’ve got the Slayer’s word on this,” Spike growled in his ear, mouth right at his neck, blunt human teeth their own threat: _I don’t even need fangs for this. _ “That good enough for you?” Shen hissed, and his face went from angry to fearful beneath Gerhard’s hand. “Can we count on you for a little decorum, mate?” 

Gerhard pulled her hand away, then slapped it back a second later when Shen snapped his jaws at empty air. “No, how’s about we don’t take that chance. Cheryl! Noam!” She shouted, and they stepped forward out of the crowd. “You two take Shen. Keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

“Not much chance of that.” Spike let go and Shen dropped to the ground, limbs splayed out and staying where they landed. Shen rolled his head from side to side, and his fingers didn’t even tremble. “From about here on down,” Spike explained, hitting his collarbone with the flat of his hand, “he’s got nothing.” He hauled Shen back up with one hand, making a show of it. “Might take you – let’s say seven months, give or take, to get back on your feet. In the meantime –” Spike shoved him roughly at the two vampires Gerhard had singled out. “Don’t make me regret not dusting you tonight, soul or not.” 

They were the first of any passengers let onto the ferry. The rest of the vampires followed, all of them, and the humans went on after them this time. The mood had changed from loud horror to quiet fear following Shen’s outburst and Spike and Gerhard’s shows of dominance. Buffy was last up the plank and the crowds parted for her as she walked from back to front. Everyone stepped away or went back inside so she could get a good view up front without anyone around. Buffy couldn’t pretend things were okay, even with nighttime bay breezes and sea salt in her face and hair. It was mostly breathing room she was after, which was why she was okay with a few people that didn’t breathe.

“I blame you for this,” Spike told Angel, not unkindly and not cheerlessly. 

“You always blame me,” Angel replied, cold and wry.

A low laugh curled out from Spike’s mouth. “Because you always deserve it, mate.” He closed his eyes for a moment to focus on a deep sniff of salty ocean air. “Makes sense, though. Shippin’ us to Alcatraz, Shen has a point there. Plenty safe, safe as houses, even, but we’d be getting punished for existing. Here,” he sighed as the island came into view, one more shape of dark against dark, “they’ve got a decent spot to stick us ’til they think of something better.”

Angel nearly smiled. “You think if I wasn’t here, they’d be sending you all to Treasure Island?”

Spike shrugged. “Alameda, maybe.”

Drusilla just leaned her forearms against the railing, quietly looking out into the night.


	11. we’re not lost where we don’t live

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Not California" by Hem.

Angel Island was big enough to get lost on and not so big that it’d take anyone a long time to get to know their way around. Three park rangers and ten other island staff members were all waiting at the island’s dock, waiting to escort them to their ultimate destination. Other than acting as tour guides, they didn’t lend much to the proceedings; still, it was nice to have someone familiar with the terrain lead them down unfamiliar paths, especially with sunrise getting closer every minute. Buffy winced internally when she saw one of the rangers had a rosary wrapped around his hand and wrist. Not the most welcoming of gestures, especially when he used that hand to wave them onto the island and lead them along, but a smart one when he was on an island with over three hundred vampires and limited escape routes. The rangers lead them on what would’ve been an otherwise pleasant ramble on a paved walking path along the edges of the island, roughly a mile by Buffy’s internal pedometer, as the stars shone high above and Tiburon and Belvedere twinkled off in the west.

Aside from the kerfuffle in the parking lot, there wasn’t any issue with where to put Millicent and everyone else. Keeping the group together and secure was the full extent of that specific concern. The League and the park rangers had needed to be far more careful about figuring out where to put the vampires, and they’d had to figure that out fast. Not just Angel Island, but where on the island. Most of the unoccupied buildings on the island had been built for the intent purpose of housing large groups of people – not that they’d had to do that for decades. It was a return to form, in a way.

One thing about the Bay Area, it was how easy to forget how _military _the whole place was.

The building the vampires were going to stay in wasn’t that impressive. Barely three stories tall with a wraparound porch, it looked like an old, stately farmhouse, except there’d never been any farms needing houses on Angel Island even going all the way back to the Miwoks. There were two more park rangers waiting by the door for them – ‘door’ being a generous term for the tarp they pushed aside, all other windows and assorted openings boarded over.

“Did it come like that?” Buffy asked the ranger closest to her. “With the sunproofing?”

The heavyset ranger shrugged. She, like everyone else, had the look of being just woken up and rushed out to do an unpleasant job. Buffy knew that look way too well. “It’s been marked for restoration the last couple decades. We’d finally been vetting a couple crews, trying to get contractors into place, when you called us tonight. Good luck for them,” she gestured at the vampires. “Otherwise who knows where we’d have put them all.” 

The ranger was right. It was a good thing they had the place handy, because if they’d housed all the vampires in the National Registrar of Historical Places-designated immigrant processing museum, it would’ve been way too much to deal with. For one thing, it’d probably be a violation of some statute about proper usage of a landmark, and two, no way was anyone getting out of that with just being spat at. The historic not-a-farmhouse had just been gathering dust and dirt for the last few decades and could be easily requisitioned into a temporary holding structure. Someplace safe and out of the sun.

Someplace safe and out of the sun within a few hundred yards of the rangers’ houses, all of whom had gotten vampire slaying and demon fighting training as part of their basic ranger education. It was kind of like why high school students learned CPR. As unlikely as it might be necessary, as probable as it was there’d be a professional in the nearby vicinity, better to have the basic training than not. Better some preparation, somebody who had the basic idea, in order to keep damage to a minimum until that professional arrived.

“This all to your liking?” The rosary-wearer asked Angel. Buffy had watched people stare at him, Spike, and Drusilla since the parking lot. The rest of the vampires could’ve passed as ordinary people in a big enough crowd, but those three had faces everyone knew.

“The building, yes.” He nodded. “Can you spare anyone to stand guard tomorrow?”

“What for?”

“We’re gettin’ into the hard part,” Spike cut in sharply. He wasn’t even trying to stay still, his head jerking around and his hands clenching. “They’re more a danger to themselves. Right now’s the time it’ll feel like there’s nothing better than walkin’ into the sunshine and cut the suffering short.” He looked at Buffy, his face softening. Just for a moment. “Not one of them’s got someone to love who’d fight to keep them in the world. They’ve just got each other, and the three of us. There’s over three hundred of them. Be a good idea to have a couple humans guard the doors, grab any poor sod what tries to make a run for it.” 

Most of the humans got to stay in unoccupied-but-still-well-furnished officers’ quarters, while Buffy got offered the guest room in Chief Ranger Suzanne Valenstein’s place. The whole guest room all for herself, no bunkmates, nobody sleeping on the floor, no one sharing the bed with her.

“It’s very generous of you,” Buffy remarked, looking around the second-floor bedroom in what was a genuinely gorgeous house. Nothing but the best for the people in charge. “You’re sure this isn’t a problem?”

“No, not at all,” Valenstein said. She wore her dark hair in a Marine-grade bun and stood at attention with a deliberately respectful amount of personal space. “It’s an honor. Do you need anything else?”

“Pajamas, my own toothbrush, I think I’m fine for now. Just a shower and I’ll be good.”

“I’m just down the hall.” Valenstein pointed redundantly, nervously, her cheeks twitching as she tried to bite down her smile. 

Buffy thanked her again and took it easy on the hot water in her shower. She curled up under the covers, glad to be clean, glad to be in a bed, and completely unsatisfied. Spike wasn’t around to stroke down her shoulder and arm, help anchor her until the adrenaline wore off, let her know things would be okay. She couldn’t cuddle up to his chest and press her face into his neck and breathe in his faint scent. There wasn’t anyone in bed with her to whisper gently, to carefully stroke her hair and tenderly run his fingers over her cheeks, reach out and touch her with skin that felt like the cool side of a pillow and hold her close. It was only her in a great big, soft bed that she wasn’t sharing with anyone. He didn’t even have this much. He didn’t even have a _bed._ At least he had people around him to talk to. At least he had people he knew with him.

Maybe it was the sleeping alone that woke her up after just a few hours. That was probably it.

She burrowed her face back into the pillows and attempted a little dozing. Then her phone beeped. And beeped again, the beep insistent of a text message. Not wanting to miss possible good news, she managed to roll out of bed, find her jeans, and pull out the phone – and nearly sobbed with joy when she read the message: _Beautiful view, terrible location, no amenities. Two stars._

She held the phone close to her chest, almost laughing, pressing her hand close over her mouth, then shot one off to Spike:_ How’s it compare to being chained in a bathtub?_

The three dots appeared at the corner of the screen, then his words appeared with the sliding ding. _Better room service in the bathtub. _Then, a few seconds later,_ 9%. See you soon, I hope._

She sent him an old-school colon-parentheses smiley face, followed by a standard thumbs-up. Translated,_ I got your message, I’ll leave you alone to let you keep battery power, I’ll be seeing you. _Feeling better than she had in the last couple of days, she started her usual yoga routine on the soft blue flower-patterned rug, taking it easy on her right hip and ankle. Valenstein wasn’t awake until a quarter past six, when Buffy was already most of the way through her workout. At six-forty-five, Buffy was dressed in her rumpled, dirty clothes from the day before, breathing in the aroma of breakfast tea.

“If you’d rather have coffee…” Valenstein hesitated, glancing around the well-appointed kitchen. “I don’t usually…”

“This is exactly what I want right now,” Buffy said, blowing the steam off gently. “Thank you.”

“Then you’re welcome! And, ah, about breakfast – was there anything special you wanted there?” Buffy could tell she was biting her tone down, but the fear and worry she _might _displease Buffy was rising out at the edges.

“Whatever you’re making.”

“No, I mean, toast? Eggs?” She stood at attention by the stove, ready to leap into action. “I don’t have any sausages but I’ve still got some oatmeal in the pantry.”

“Toast and eggs would be great.” Buttered toast, crispy fried eggs, with a healthy serving of salsa. It was filling and tasty, and Buffy gave Valenstein all the thanks and praise she could get away with and only put up a token protest over not being allowed to help clear the table. She knew she’d regret the salsa later, but for now, Buffy was just going to enjoy the lingering zing all over her tongue and damn the reflux.

She knew she could ask to use Valenstein’s computer, or her TV, although there wouldn’t be any point to it. Anything worth hearing, she would hear from someone personally. So she asked to borrow a cell phone charger instead, and closed the bedroom door for the feeling of privacy.

It was three hours ahead in Philadelphia, and Dawn picked up on the second ring.

“They’ve been interviewing people all morning. All the big networks,” she told Buffy matter-of factly, once they each assured the other that they were fine. “No one who was directly involved with any of it, just people who got booted out of Berkeley. Putting a nice_ human _face to the tragedy.”

Buffy huffed. “So what’s the take?”

“They’re calling it an American Chernobyl,” Dawn relayed with fake cheer.

“That’s not bad,” she agreed, matching her sister’s tone. “Thing go boom, big evacuation, manmade cause, I can see it.”

“I had to turn it off after a few minutes. I’m mostly sticking to the websites, and it – it really doesn’t look good,” she said in a rush. “There’s not even any drone footage. Which I guess isn’t all that surprising.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to risk flying a drone into something this unknown. The League’s working on getting it contained since last night, but they haven’t called me with any updates yet, which I assume means they’re still busy with it.” She got up onto the bed to sit down tailor-style, leaning over her crossed legs to try something to quell the nausea that had nothing to do with breakfast. Taking a deep breath, she asked, “Are they keeping you in the loop?”

“Only if I start name-dropping. I figured since you’re not dead and still on this plane of reality, you’d call me as soon as you could.” Dawn tried to be flippant, though Buffy heard the shivering underneath, and the relief layered over everything. She smiled; her old birthday gift still doing its job of letting Dawn know her sister’s general status and whereabouts, and it even doubled as a nice desk ornament. “Nobody’s saying what set it off, just a lot of magic force, and they’re not saying anything about you. But – should I call and let them know who’s asking?”

“I’m fine for now. You’ll probably know if something’s wrong with me before I do.” Dawn made a sound halfway between a laugh and a croak. Buffy heard her take a questioning breath, which she barreled right through, semi-changing the subject: “They’ve stuck us all on Angel Island.”

“Seriously? Are things that bad?”

“Turns out they are. There’s about twenty-three people that – are you sitting down?”

She needed to be, when Buffy told her what’d happened.

“Those_ fuckers,”_ she hissed.

“Pretty much.”

“I – I know this is wrong, but I have to say it, can I give them credit for giving you something new at your age?”

“Oh my God, Dawn!” Buffy laughed out. And kept laughing, because it felt so good to laugh. Because laughing was easier than crying, and getting angry without anything to direct it at wouldn’t do her any good right now. “Sure, go ahead. They deserve all the credit and then some.” 

“They had an Urami demon saying only humans are stupid enough for something this dangerous, which…” Dawn sighed with fake melodrama. “I can’t say he was wrong.”

“Too true.” Buffy lay back against the pillows, still chuckling, and looked up at the ceiling. From this vantage point, she could make out the trees beyond the second-story window, and between that window, the bed, and Dawn’s voice in her ear working to keep her spirits up, she wasn’t pretending things weren’t bad. She was just allowing herself a moment of thinking they might turn out okay.


	12. soon enough this will fade

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Human Remains" by Tom McRae.

After she’d updated Dawn and Noah with everything she had to share, Buffy made another call to the League. The news, such as it was, didn’t sound good. The League was sending a team to Angel Island later to share more detailed news in person, though Buffy got a brief rundown of the situation. Which was, containment was possible and efforts were already underway, it’d take longer than a week to clean up the area and get it safe enough for people to go back to. How much longer, nobody knew, and as soon as they did, they’d call her, so keep her phone handy.

“As long as you’re sending people out here, could you have them swing by my hotel room first?”

It turned out they could. Another unlikelihood made likely, and she now had something to look forward to. A step up from things to do without looking forward to them.

A few of the would-be conspirators were hanging out, not doing much of anything, just passing the time by sitting outside and quietly talking. Like they were on spring break, or out at summer camp. As though they didn’t have a care in the world, unburdened from guilt and not even bearing a single hint of remorse over what they’d done. Just sitting and talking and waiting for consequences to come to them.

Buffy didn’t give them a second glance as she made her way up the hill. She had to lean in close and squint at the sign outside the not-a-farmhouse. Turned out, it was a small hospital and a part of the old West Garrison, along with the water-side quartermaster building and the rest of the Officer’s Row where the would-be conspirators were hanging out that very moment. A small military hospital they’d built on the opposite side of the island from the big one in order to better manage quarantine situations. She looked up from reading the rest of the sign, and caught sight of the two women standing outside the one entrance point. The pair had been lounging on the covered porch, and scrambled to their feet as soon as they saw her watching them. If they’d thrown in a salute, Buffy wouldn’t have been surprised. She recognized them vaguely from the night before, though she hadn’t gotten their names.

“Hello,” she greeted them. “Good morning, good to see you. Everything going okay out here?”

“Ms. Summers,” the taller one with long blonde hair nodded. “Is there something wrong?”

“I came to check on the vampires.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at the shorter one with curly red hair. “I suppose if it’s you, it’s okay.”

“You here to keep them in or keep other people out?” Buffy asked curtly.

“The first one, Ms. Summers,” the shorter one replied. “It wasn’t our – I mean, they said to us, they told us, they said,” she swallowed and forced the names out of her mouth, “Angel and Spike and Drusilla, they told us to keep the new ones safe, not to leave them in danger of themselves. They –”

“I know why you’re here,” Buffy responded. It wasn’t as much fun to see them squirm as she’d thought. “Just checking on you two. And on the vampires. Assuming I’m _allowed _to do so.” She gestured at the tarp, and the taller one pulled it aside for her.

The dark-skinned vampire sitting on the inside of the doorway looked up at her as soon as she stepped into the gloom. “Slayer,” he gasped, and she felt sick.

Kids were always hard. He looked about fourteen. There was a weariness that youthfully-turned ones got that even Angel couldn’t ever touch. It went way beyond soul-having and into a deeper understanding of all that had been lost, no matter how much joy there was for them to experience in the world. Add a soul to that, and no wonder he’d begged her last night to completely end himself.

“What’s your name?” she blurted out.

“Ramesh,” he whispered. He tensed his arms and shifted his weight. “Can I –”

“No. Don’t get up,” she told him. “_Please_, don’t get up. You want my blessing? It’s yours, walk in peace through the world, just please, don’t get up.” _Don’t get up and bow to me, I can’t take that right now._

He didn’t, staying on the floor and looking away from her. Buffy’s eyes adjusted slowly, and as she blinked, it got easier to make out the shapes of the bodies. At this point, there wasn’t a better way to describe them. Vampires they might all be, and one thing she’d learned about vampires – learned early, hard, and often, and too well to forget at this point in her life – was they were always somehow moving. Even when stalking prey and holding themselves still, they managed to give off a sense of readiness, of arrested, waiting movement rather than utter lack of motion. Even when asleep, they’d occasionally snort through their nose or huff out a cough or whisper something as their dreams so moved them, rarely enough to be surprising and often enough to remind her about the prefix _un_ as attached to the usual adjective_ dead._

These vampires were doing absolutely nothing to show off there was anyone home. They lay propped up against the walls or curled up around themselves. No shivering. No crying. No blinking. Thousand-yard stares turned inward, trying to come to terms with what had been done to them. Buffy knew it would’ve been bad form to lean in and blow air over their eyes to get them to react, and suppressed the urge as she walked on past them. Like they’d done back in Berkeley, the more present ones were helping their friends as best they could, keeping their arms around them or stroking someone’s head they’d laid in their lap. She couldn’t tell who they were really doing it for. More likely, they were doing it for them both, the need for contact going in both directions. And sometimes, knowing you were helping was its own kind of comfort. 

Vampires were everywhere, yet the one she was looking for couldn’t be found. Not in the big long room, downstairs in the basement, or in the smaller square rooms. Not until she got upstairs, where it wasn’t quite as dark as everywhere else. The windows were boarded shut, but there was some light coming from Spike’s cell phone. About twelve vampires were huddled around it, listening intently, like they were radio officers waiting for the next wartime broadcast or the newest set of marching orders. It was too quiet for Buffy to make out at this distance. Even so, she could tell from the looks on their faces and the way they sat, that it was the same news Dawn had heard. 

Drusilla spotted her first, nodded in acknowledgment and smiled slyly, then whispered something to Spike. Spike whispered something back to her, and then finally, Buffy was in his arms again.

She took a moment to soak in the sensation of his arms around hers, the solidity of his body under her hands. “You doing okay?” she asked quietly. A stupid question, and she still wanted to hear him tell her out loud.

“Not so much,” he said honestly. The blank anger she’d seen before he got on the bus was still there in his eyes, joined by a sort of fatigue that made her think of siege campaigns and long months spent in hiding. 

“How’s everyone else?” she asked.

“Holding steady.” He leaned against her, whispering his next words so only she could hear them. “Angel’s downstairs with the worst of the poor sods, and the guards are keeping anyone from making a break for the sunshine. Wouldn’t say we’re_ good,_ but we’re managing from one moment to the next.”

“And the one after that,” she murmured.

“More or less.” He ran a cool hand up her bare arm, then sniffed gently. “Oh, love, you didn’t.”

“I’ll be fine,” she pressed. “I’ll have some tea later and willingly accept the consequences of my actions.” 

He still looked at her dubiously. 

“As flattering as it is you think my having eaten some salsa today is the biggest thing to worry about, we both know it seriously isn’t.” 

That got a little snort of a laugh.

“Where’s Shen?”

“In the basement. Noam’s keeping an eye on him.”

“Good.” She nodded. No more threats for a danger llama impression. “Anything I can do for you guys? I mean, reasonably?”

Someone from the back of the room made a barely-audible Charlie Brown teacher sound. Spike nodded and said, “Swing by later to grab my mobile. It’s down to eight percent.” Another teacher sound. “Six, now, and there’s no outlets here to charge it up anyway.”

“Will do,” she promised, wishing she could lend him hers, not wanting to wait to hear that call she hoped was coming. She kissed him instead, and watched him sit back down next to Drusilla, who rested a hand on his shoulder as he fiddled with the phone and turned the sound up a little. She stepped in closer, trying to focus on the news broadcast – she caught some talk about how to resettle four million people when there wasn’t any way to predict how long they’d be gone – until she couldn’t ignore the effect she had on everyone around her. They were fidgeting, glancing her way, holding themselves even more carefully than before she’d come in. Souls, bad news, the Slayer: pick two and they’d be okay.

She wanted to be there, standing right at Spike’s shoulder and looking down at his gorgeous neck. The vampires didn’t need her around.

So she went to the trouble of getting a good-bye kiss, and going to the trouble of not looking back, she left them alone.

As Buffy walked, letting her feet make the decisions, she tried not to think about anything in particular. Focus herself on the place and the moment. The sky overhead, the bay around whenever she could spot it through the scrub and the trees. It was more than a nice day: it was a remarkably nice day. No clouds to get in the way of that deep California blue, no fog covering the view to San Francisco. The breezes picked up the higher she climbed. Buffy felt them more than she could hear them: against her skin, not in her ears, except for the faint edges of the usual sounds. She sighed and kept walking, the cold of the breezes fighting with the warmth of the sunshine. 

The trails looped around, switchbacks instead of pure elevation gain, which could be for the benefit of bike riders though right now it felt like it was for the benefit of her aching right hip. The door had been a bad idea. It was a little bit like hiking in the mountains near Sebastopol – except it was hardly a real mountain. Instead, the last little mountain left before the bay came melting in.

From the Eastern side of the island, the view was clear all the way out to Berkeley. All the way out to the peaks and hills where it’d all gone down the night before. It couldn’t have been that many Ice Ages ago she’d have been able to walk to there from here. It’d been about twenty hours since Drusilla had shown up in her hotel room. A hike from here to there, up and down mountains and across what used to be a flat river plane, twenty hours seemed about right for how long that would take.

Buffy didn’t know how long it’d taken for the bay to flood. It would’ve been a while. More than weeks, plenty more than months. At least years, probably decades if not centuries. It’d be easy enough to check later, and be sure to look up how the people who’d lived here back before Russia and Spain managed to deal with the flooding and how they’d left their old lives behind as the world ended around them. Because – well, that was California. If it wasn’t a flood, it was an earthquake. If it wasn’t an earthquake, it was a fire. Or a mudslide. Drought, storm, plague, genocide. Manmade or completely natural, it was always going to be something. Despite living all over the world, nowhere suited her as well as where she’d grown up. Because in California, you always had to be ready for the end of the world.

She was supposed to be _done_ with stopping the end of the world.

The air was clear of fog and clouds, and the sky was over Berkeley was still busy. The nighttime Northern-Lights-meets-impressionism effect had given way to something more translucent and shining in the daylight. Abalone, nacre, mother-of-pearl. Just like the night before, it moved – not so much from this distance, but she could make out the edges swirling and spinning around themselves, colors shifting gently. It looked beautiful.

She tried swallowing around the lump in her throat, then let the angry, heavy breaths heave out._ It shouldn’t be beautiful,_ she thought. _It’s not right it looks beautiful._ She pressed a hand against her mouth, and the heaves didn’t stop, except the tears weren’t coming, either. Cold, heavy sorrow for a gorgeous, beautiful day – that was her life, the whole way though.


	13. don't fall through the stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Grey Ghost" by Mike Doughty.

The call Buffy had been waiting for came right after lunch. 

She’d been making not-so-idle conversation with Valenstein over some microwaved leftovers. Getting background information that felt good to have, like island mail runs, and less pertinent information, like how long Valenstein had been at her current post, what her job entailed, the story behind the marksmanship plaques hanging in the hallway. Valenstein was giving Buffy some of the finer details about weekly grocery runs when Buffy’s phone rang, which she took as an excuse to step out into the still-warm sunshine. The call had her heading across the island, down the hillside to the visitor’s center, around the back, and through the staff-only entrance.

Buffy had toured palaces, police stations, castles, fortresses, museums, houses of parliament, houses of presidents, assembly halls, great big complexes and little ramshackle headquarters, and in every single one, all over the world, if you went through the right door you’d find yourself past the statues and murals and tourist exhibitions and into the place where the real work happened. Every major organization had rooms like it. There were surface differences, like the posters on the walls and the kinds of chairs and whether the floor was carpet or laminated wood, yet the spirit was always the same. Every single one of those rooms gave off the same vibe of get-it-doneness.

Mostly, it made Buffy wish Xander was still around. Human Resources was always where he’d shone brightest. She could imagine him on Treasure Island, gray beard and glass eye, coordinating all the relief and relocation efforts and making sure everyone was in the best possible spot for their skills and talent to be put to greatest use. But as per his final wishes, he couldn’t be reached. As such, no reason to do more than indulge in a moment of wistfulness as everyone filed in. The room was populated by a handful of the conspirators, a few of the island’s staff, two League representatives that knew what was happening, and someone to speak on behalf of the city of Berkeley. Buffy had sat in on bigger meetings about worse situations. At least, she hoped that’d still be the case by the time Dahlia and Clive were done filling everyone in on the recent, relevant findings.

After everyone went around the table and introduced themselves, Dahlia cleared her throat and straightening her tie. “All right. So the –”

“How many?” Buffy asked. Demanded, really.

Dahlia blinked and couldn’t decide to open or close her mouth, but when she started to talk, didn’t so much as stutter. “Fifty-nine. All gone by the time they got to Treasure Island. We don’t have a number for how many didn’t make it out.” Buffy kept her focus on Dahlia, the better to avoid catching sight of Millicent’s face. “There’s a hundred and seventy-four in critical condition we can’t move again, and another sixty-two we’re not touching for fear of setting off a cascading chain magical reaction. We’ve put in for medics to come to the island, though – the hospitals in San Francisco and the rest of the region are currently sitting at capacity. We’re about three bodies away from calling in veterinarians, never mind what that will look like to the local demon communities, vets are qualified to deal with patients that can’t explain why they’re in pain. Don’t quote me on this, but at least the ones in pain have a decent amount of physical integrity, which, count your blessings here. It’d be worse if –”

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” called Gregory Sutter, long-sitting councilman of Berkeley’s third precinct, before looking around the room. “I thought everyone was already –”

The door was slammed open and shut, two terrific bangs of noise, by an indistinguishable figure swathed up in a tarp. Shedding it aside with more grace to the action than Buffy had ever seen Spike manage, Gerhard pulled up a chair and situated herself in between Buffy and Clive. Vampires_ always_ knew how to make an entrance. “Go on,” Gerhard told her, folding her arms over each other at the wrist. “You were saying?”

“I’m sorry, but you are…?” Dahlia asked delicately.

“Gerhard,” Gerhard answered calmly. She was also in the same clothes from the night before, and her hair was pleated into a single dark braid. “And there’s no miss, no missus, no doctor, nothing. It’s just Gerhard.”

“And you’re one of the vampires?”

“Yes.” She nodded with a flat smile. “I am.”

“All right. Thank you.” Dahlia swallowed and went on. “I was saying it’s a good thing this happened when it did. Because if everyone involved had gone through with the original plan to do it this afternoon, during what would have been the graduation ceremony, it’d have been –” She closed her eyes, bowed her head and placed her palms flat on the table for a moment, breathing carefully before she opened her eyes and went on. “As difficult as it was to evacuate everyone last night, trying it today would’ve been all but impossible to do effectively. Most of the campus was empty, people accepted it was an emergency. Today, I’d rather not think about it.” Buffy didn’t blame her.

“About the disaster itself,” Dahlia went on, “we’ve managed to contain the edges of it so it’s no longer spreading. The –”

_“Spreading?”_ Millicent asked. “I knew something happened, but what do you mean, spreading?”

“What I mean is the area where you performed the ritual, reality is so ragged at the edges it looks like it’s full of holes and throughout – no, not quite _holes._” Dahlia pressed her knuckles against her mouth and Buffy let her guts unclench. Holes were openings. Openings were portals. Except right now they weren’t dealing with portals. Which was good. She hated dealing with portals. This situation was completely new to her, and thankfully, at least it wasn’t a portal.

Dahlia went on, “Holes isn’t quite accurate since nothing’s passed through since the mass soul ritual was performed. The movement of so much mystic energy all at once softened – yes, let’s say softened. Reality in the area is still more or less intact but it’s soft, now, soft enough that it’s not safe to be within or near because there’s no telling what might happen or come out of the place.”

“Just like the rest of the Bay Area,” Clive muttered, who looked like he could be handsome if he got his hair under control and picked up a new pair of glasses.

“Thank you, Clive. Always finding new ways to tell old jokes,” Dahlia deadpanned. She shook her head. “Anything else we do could rip the place open, tear it apart, however you want to describe it. We’ve gotten it contained, though it’s nowhere near stabilized. Anyone attempting to go near, or in, there’s no promise it’ll be you coming out, or if you’ll come out at all. It’s also not _not_ a possibility. We haven’t figured out how to undo or repair the damage done, so – contained is the best news I can give.” 

A few attendees went blank. Others paled considerably. A couple dropped their heads, Gerhard simply nodded, and Millicent forced out most of the tremble in her voice and said, “What do we need to do?”

Dahlia whipped her head around to stare at Millicent, eyes brimming with fury. “There’s_ nothing _more you can do,” she pressed out, each sound perfectly clipped.

“No, I mean,” Millicent gestured around the table, trying to separate out the small part of the world she represented, the part which was responsible for everyone being here, “what do you need us to do?”

Dahlia looked at Clive, who pursed his lips and shook his head. She nodded and looked back at Millicent. “There’s an examination to check for contamination or any unexpected effects from being in close proximity to the event. You should do that.”

“That sounds pretty reasonable,” Buffy said. “Prudent, even. I assume you’re checking the vampires, too? Being at ground zero of the event and all.”

“We…”

“I’m sure you have something that goes ding when there’s stuff,” Gerhard remarked. “Does it only scan souls? Because we’ve got those now, if that’s a problem.”

“What happened was more wibbly-wobbly than timey-wimey,” Robert offered. “I’m just saying it might not –”

“In any case,” Buffy cut them off, “it’s good you’ve thought of checking everyone for magical fallout, so when do we get started on that? Because you make it sound like sooner, rather than later, is the way to go with it. I say this operating under the assumption that you know what you’re looking for.”

“We do,” Dahlia said quickly. “We do, yes. We’ll have someone from the San Francisco clinic here by tonight.”

“Looking forward to it,” Gerhard acknowledged. “Meanwhile, is there any way for us to get something to eat while we’re kept here? We’ll all be fine for another few days, but if we’re going to be here longer than that, things are going to start getting difficult for us to hold it together. You’ve got haema on this island, right?”

“I’m sorry,” Sutter said, not sounding sorry at all, “I don’t want to come across as rude, but what are you doing here?”

“I’m here to speak on behalf of the ensouled vampires,” Gerhard told him. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“See, I don’t know, which is why I asked. Did you all take a vote or something for the spokesman to be you? I assume there was a vote. You do know how to vote, right?” His voice dripped sarcasm in every vowel.

“It was more of a general agreement and consensus. Councilman Sutter,” Gerhard pulled her lips back from her teeth without actually smiling. “I know you don’t like us and that you’ve never liked us. My role right now isn’t to get you to consider the possibility of liking us, but for me to make sure we finally get a say in what happens to us. We’re never going to be able to vote for you in any district election so you can save the anti-vampire speeches for the next campaign cycle. Right now, I’m making sure that the decisions made on our behalf actually involve us helping to make them.” She rested her arms on the table and leaned over in his direction. When she spoke, it was soft, quiet, forced calm. “You’re here for Berkeley, which I won’t deny is a noble reason to be here, except the thing about you being here is that there’s plenty of other people who could be here for the city. There’s just me who can be here for the vampires. So, again, is there any haema on the island?”

Valenstein and Orozco looked at each other. Buffy bit the inside of her cheek to keep herself from smiling. Orozco was the one to finally answer Gerhard’s question. “No, I’m afraid there isn’t. The first aid station’s not equipped for that. It’s for patching people up until they can get to a real hospital.”

“Shen still needs some help healing. The rest of us can wait a few days before things start to get difficult. When’s the next big shipment of perishable goods to this island? There’s a couple meatpacking plants in Marin that do direct bulk blood orders.” Everyone at the table stared at her. She rolled her eyes. “It’s food, isn’t it? Yes, we mostly eat haema now, but we’ve been around way before Fu Xue Wu invented it.”

Nobody seemed happy that feeding the vampires was the only practical thing they could deal with at the moment. Everything else had to be waited on, waited for, more to come later, figure out what had to be done before getting to it. The most they could do was learn what had happened, what was happening, and what people thought might be going to happen, and ask which butchers to call for bulk livestock blood delivery. It didn’t feel great to have to sit around listening to Dahlia talk about how the magicians were taking beginning steps to figure out stabilization strategies that wouldn’t backfire and rip the world asunder when listening was the only action available.

When making sure vampires got fed was the most they could do, they’d be sure to do that as best they could.

Maybe throw in a couple dozen live chickens and some deer.

After everything got wrapped up, as finished as it all could be, Gerhard was the first to leave. She wrapped herself up in the tarp as best she could, throwing it over her shoulder and into the air like a cloak, and let Buffy hold the door open for her. A few people stared, like Sutter – openly watching her try to protect herself from burning up into dust with a flimsy bit of canvas sheeting, then openly staring at Buffy as she left to walk beside Gerhard. They were headed in the same direction anyway.

“Should’ve packed a daysuit,” Gerhard murmured. Buffy had to admit she had a point: the afternoon sunshine was starting to slant through the trees and light up the leaves in that fabulous early summer California way. It would’ve been nice to sit out in it and take it in, lack of peripheral vision or no.

“Hey!” Gerhard stopped and Buffy turned to see Millicent jogging up the paved road to join them. “Hey,” she repeated, walking around so Gerhard could just raise her arms a bit to keep her face covered and look out from underneath the tarp to see her face. “I…I wanted to say something.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely,” Gerhard said. “Look, can this wait a few minutes?”

“It’ll be quick. I promise. I just wanted to say I’m sorry you had to be there.”

“What?”

“Someone should have – I should have gone to see you this morning. You shouldn’t have had to be there, it was dangerous for you to head out like that. I’d have made sure your concerns were heard by everyone.”

“I’m sure you would’ve, but like I said, we reached a consensus and decided it’d be me. Now, is there anything else? Because I really need to get back inside and _out of the sun.”_

“Look, I’m trying to say I’m on your side here,” Millicent pressed, her hands shaking in the air by her face. “Can you accept that for what it is? That’s all I’ve ever been trying to do, and I know what I did last night didn’t work but can’t you see I was trying to make things better for you?”

Gerhard shifted around under the tarp so she could hold in one hand. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Millicent, you should –” Buffy began.

“Look, I’m not asking you to be grateful to me or anything,” she ignored Buffy, and Gerhard’s cold expressionlessness, voice thin as she pleaded, “I’m trying to say everything I’ve been doing I’ve been doing for you, all I wanted is for you to be_ better_, I wanted to make sure you were_ people,_ and –”

There was a shot of motion from beneath the tarp, and anything else Millicent might have said was lost in her scream.

“You didn’t do _anything _for us,” Gerhard said in ice-hot anger, her hand in flames as she held it tight around Millicent’s arm. “Don’t try to tell me you wanted to make the world better, or safer, or happier. You took away our choices about our lives because _you _thought you knew what was best for us, and believe me, I know about having my choices taken away in the name of making the world better.” Gerhard clenched her fingers even as they kept on burning in the sunshine, twisting her arm to force Millicent down to the ground, and the smell hit Buffy right in the bottom of her stomach. “Everything you did to us, you did for _you._” Gerhard let go, pulling her hand back under the tarp and beating the fire away, cradling her arm against her body and curling around the injury. Millicent was doing much the same, except she had four different people rush up around her while Gerhard stood alone and sunk to her knees, folding close around herself.

“Hey!” Buffy shouted as more people came running, positioning herself between them and Gerhard in case they were after disproportionate retribution. Gerhard would already be suffering enough pain for giving Millicent what she’d earned. “We need some help over here!”

Help for Millicent: bactine, and bandages, a quick painkiller spell and an emergency boat ride to San Francisco where she’d be treated in an actual hospital ahead of everyone she’d endangered while Gerhard had to make her way through the sunshine with only one hand to hold the tarp secure around her and in more pain than Buffy wanted to imagine. Buffy glanced at the people swarming around Millicent and at the figure curled into a fetal knot on the ground all alone. Not even sparing a look back, Buffy crouched down, picked Gerhard up, and and carried her the rest of the way across the island. Never mind the stench of burned flesh. She’d smelled worse.

“Buffy,” Gerhard mumbled through the tarp. “I…Buffy…”

“Don’t talk,” Buffy told her.

“Danke,” she breathed softly, and fell silent.

Buffy didn’t say anything more, just kept walking. Eyes up, shoulders back, not thinking about the lack of movement in the body in her arms. It wasn’t until Gerhard was safely inside and Ramesh took her that Buffy got a look at Gerhard’s arm. It was burned up even worse than Millicent’s. It’d heal up faster and more completely, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt like hell.

“Jesus Christ, you did this on purpose?” Ramesh asked Gerhard, gently tending to her arm with medical supplies Buffy had gathered from Valenstein’s place – without any explicit permission, though she was pretty sure she’d be forgiven. She was Buffy Summers, after all. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“You should’ve seen her,” Gerhard finally wheezed out, eyes closed and bearing through the pain. “The look on her face. It was like she’d forgotten what I am.”

“That’s usually the goal of assimilation,” he drawled, securing the gauze.

The door guard’s walkie-talkie bristled, and she stepped outside to answer it. By the time Miyake came back in, Gerhard’s arm was mummified from the bicep on down, Ramesh was taping up the last of her fingers, and pretty much every vampire in the place had come to see what’d happened. “Vargas got sent to the city,” Miyake told the gathered crowd. “She’s at the Nob Hill burn center. Thought you’d like to know.”

“Hang on, hang the_ fuck_ on, you did this to Millicent? The Millicent behind all this shit?” Ramesh asked. Gerhard didn’t open her eyes to nod. “You burned fucking_ Millicent Vargas?” _He jumped up and shouted, “She did it to Millicent Vargas!”

Buffy watched Miyake’s face as the cheer went up and through the building, as everyone hollered in broken joy and the knowledge of shared, mutual pain. One of the catatonics braced up against the wall even blinked and twisted her lips into a smile, the most movement Buffy had seen from her.

Miyake just shook her head, looking disgusted. “How can you all cheer like that?”

“Oh, come on, now,” Spike grinned, sidling up to stand right behind Miyake. “You’re not seein’ the whole picture here. The reason these sods all got cursed and had souls stuffed inside was to make them better at being human. Now they’re happy the person that hurt them’s also gotten hurt herself.” 

He cocked his head. “So tell me, pet, what’s more human than that?”


	14. know if you've found me at last

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "I Wish I Was the Moon" by Neko Case.

No matter the situation, fresh underwear felt _great_. Unpacking in the guest room made her feel like she was really settling in. Living out of a suitcase at least gave her the illusion she’d be gone soon. Whoever’d retrieved her and Spike and Drusilla’s stuff from the hotel room managed to get pretty much everything, from the weapons to the estrogen cream, and they hadn’t folded her clothes back up before stuffing them into the suitcase. Which, in the grand scheme of things: no big. Buffy could probably borrow an iron from someone. She was sure park rangers had to iron their trousers, so someone on the island would – 

_Hang on, not everything._ If they weren’t with her medications, urinary and otherwise, and if they weren’t with her jewelry, then…well, she knew where they were, but if they weren’t here, then knowing exactly where they were wasn’t much help.

She took everything out of her suitcase, everything out of Spike’s suitcase, sorted through her purse, and even triple-checked the side pockets. Once she was certain, she allowed herself to sit on the floor and indulge in a deservedly petulant sulk.

They’d forgotten her hearing aids. They were probably in the hotel room’s bedside table, two small beige objects in a tiny white case that’d slid to the back of the drawer when she’d closed it firmly that got overlooked as the volunteers did their best to politely ransack everything worth taking. It wasn’t like she needed them to live. Or be comfortable. Or like they were her only pair, or that she couldn’t replace them. She just didn’t like the fuss of replacing them, and while it was one thing to travel with extra throwing axes, Buffy hadn’t thought she needed to travel with a second pair of hearing aids.

Take it as a learning experience and move on with her life.

That said, given why she didn’t have them with her right now, things definitely qualified for the ‘bigger issues to worry about’ clause in her ‘reasons to keep perspective’ checklist.

Three magic-medics dropped in around seven o’clock, and finished scanning the humans for magical residue and fallout around eight. Buffy and the other three Slayers had all gotten a solid dose, such as it was, and it was fading off them fast enough it wouldn’t present any big problems down the line. Maybe some weird dreams or sensitivity to magnets for a few days, and a couple weeks from now, nothing more to worry about.

The twenty ordinary humans weren’t quite so untouched. Same dose, same exposure, and on them, it was sticking around and clinging hard. There were ways to clean it off – none of them pleasant, most of them involving small mammal sacrifices and stone circles, all of them unfeasible for the immediate future. They were stable, at least, and that was something.

The vampires were fine. At least, in terms of carrying fallout around. It’d all sloughed off after a few hours like sand after a day at the beach. The medics would’ve happily stuck around and asked them questions about it, except none of the vampires capable of answering questions wanted to sit still long enough to do that. Soul-ache was one thing; restlessness didn’t help with that any. Waiting for food that’d take a few days to arrive, waiting to hear how long before they could go home, waiting to hear what would end up happening to them, nothing but the waiting, and doing what they could to ease the burden somehow. Stretching their legs was about all they could do. Which really wasn’t much at all.

Vampires on the prowl. Except there wasn’t anything they could hunt, and nothing they could really do to harm anyone.

Angel Island was the biggest natural island in the San Francisco Bay, which still wasn’t a huge land mass. Three hundred fifty-one souls between three hundred fifty-two vampires, forty-four humans and Slayers, plus Drusilla, scattered around just over a square mile meant there wasn’t any getting away from everyone else to really feel alone. The most you could do was get a little personal space.

Even after decades of practicing social living habits, vampires were good at maintaining personal space. It was part of their charm, really. They might steal a glance or two from over a hill or down a road, and they weren’t going to crowd up around you. Focus enough, and you were fine.

In all her years on the planet, one of the hardest things Buffy had learned to do in a crisis was to stop. To recognize she’d done everything she could, with what she had, where she was in the moment. Yes, there’d be something coming along later. No, it wasn’t here right now, so she could take a few minutes to eat a sandwich or drink some water. She could take a couple hours to nap, could step back from everything that was happening because there wasn’t anything more she could do about it. Not that it came easily to her. Buffy had struggled with that notion since she was fifteen and she wasn’t going to quit wrestling with it now.

Her usual method was the same kind of slow-down as a California Roll: not exactly coming to a full cessation of motion. Even at a time like this, stuck on a small island and watching San Francisco shine like its own galaxy against the night, knowing full well she’d done all she could, it took someone else to help ease her into making a complete stop.

“How’s everyone doing?”

“Managin’s about the best to hope for.” Spike sighed, kicking up some gravel. “They’re getting better, most of them. Hate to say it, those crusading berks were right about having someone around. The questions I’ve been asked, sometimes hearing there’s no answer’s a help. Just to_ know _there’s no answer instead of worrying yourself sick about it.”

“Yeah,” she said, keeping her tone gentle.

He picked up what she’d put down. “And it’s not like – yeah, the newness hurts, it always hurts. What I went through’s nowhere near the same and_ some _of it’s close_ enough_ to mean something. They don’t – all they want’s to hear someone say they know it hurts. It’s –” 

Spike swung his head around as they passed by one of the row houses, fixing the front window with a cold, unblinking gaze. Buffy followed his line of sight and saw the curtain fall back into place, then pull back up again. Safe as houses, as the saying went, especially when it came to vampires. No reason not to stare at one openly and shamelessly from the protection of sitting behind the threshold.

He waved. The little girl, some staff member’s daughter, flinched and went back to staring, eying Spike like he was some sort of rare bird. “Yeah, yeah, get your jollies in,” he snarled, waving again for good measure. “Take a good look.” The girl didn’t wave back, though she tensed her shoulder and arm before relaxing them to go on watching. Spike fixed her with a long, hard stare, not moving away until Buffy wrapped her hands around his elbow and pulled him along.

“Think they’ll invite me back again next year?” she asked, once they cleared the row.

“Course they will,” Spike assured her. “Either you’re giving a fabulous speech or you’ve cancelled the end of the world again. Doesn’t matter which one; no matter what, it’s good you stopped on by. Not that the second option’s something to hope for.”

“End of the world cancellations a specialty. I should get the League to put that on the business cards.”

“Not the worst thing to be known for.”

They kept walking along the paved road, the same route she’d taken alone a few hours earlier. “How’s Drusilla?” she asked before she could stop herself.

“Doin’ all right,” he said. Cheerfully, like they were talking about meeting up with old friends for tea and pastries. Not joyfully, like they were talking about Dawn’s grandchildren coming over to visit. Majorly relieving to hear the one tone of voice and not the other. “She was saying she’d go out, say hello to the island ghosts. Told me they’re like her friends back in Pripyat, just happy to have someone that can talk to them.” He looked up at the swaying eucalyptus trees. “She’s not exactly – I’m not sayin’ that it’s not good to see her, more that she’s waiting for something and she’s not telling me what that’s gonna be. She says I’ll know when it gets here.”

“It’s not a problem Angel’s around?”

“Nah. They’re keepin’ their distance and using me if they’ve got anything they need to tell each other. Which they haven’t, much.”

“Okay,” Buffy said. They walked, and kept walking, through the sweet nighttime air. “How’s it smell?”

“Real nice,” he answered. “Mostly ocean, a lot of animals. No cars since the day before yesterday, so there’s more of them out and about than there’d be otherwise. Expect there’ll be even more tomorrow. Keep an eye out, you’ll see some.” 

Spike tilted his head towards the island, away from the city, and took a deep sniff. “Not a lot in bloom. There’s a few ahead, some up the hillside. Don’t ask me the names; they’re not what we’ve got at home. If my phone was charged up – you’re charging it, right?” She murmured agreement. “Well, if it was, we’d get an ID for them, or snap a pic for later, so we’ll just have to remember to check.” He wrapped his free hand around both of hers, still tucked in the crook of his elbow. It was a warm enough night she was glad for his slight coolness. “Shame it took this whole mess to get us here.”

“It’s a good view.” Looking out over the Bay, San Francisco sparkled against the dark like it was made of stars. “I’m glad we can share it. Of course,” she looked at him, going all playfully sharp, “you _could_ just get a new daysuit.”

“Love, we’ve been over this,” he pressed. “What they’ve –” He whipped his head up.

“What?”

He didn’t answer, just pulled away from her and burst into a run back to the Officer’s Row. Buffy sprinted along after Spike. As they got closer, it was possible for her to hear it too: people shouting, people running down toward the beach, people pouring out of the hills and trees. It was difficult to make out the shapes at the water’s edge, just the movement and splashing as two shapes dove into the surf, swimming toward the commotion. Peering out into the darkness of the water, Buffy idly wished she’d packed a swimsuit, because the beach down at the edge of the Row really was a great place to go swimming in San Francisco Bay. Her mind abruptly jerked back to the task at hand when someone next to her asked what the hell had just happened.

“Hatchet made a swim for it.” The reply came from a nearby vampire, who pointed at the shapes, then started to wring her hands frantically. “He just stepped away for a second. We thought he was fine, but he stepped away, and we didn’t see him until someone – it was Drusilla – she’s out there now, she’s gone in after him.”

“Made a swim for it?” Buffy allowed herself a tiny bit of cheekiness. The vampire did a double-take, then glared. 

“I can’t say he made a _run _for it, can I?”

“You got me there.”

Drusilla and two other vampires pulled Hatchet from the Bay, restraining him on the beach by the quartermaster building down by the water. He was struggling, screaming, and freaking out the humans standing nearby, who stopped gawping to run off to their house. Buffy focused on Hatchet, who only calmed down a little bit when he saw Buffy standing over him. Still with the struggling, less with the screaming to_ let me go, please, let me go and let me find a way out of this,_ nothing she hadn’t heard before.

“Hatchet,” Buffy said, and his eyes snapped to hers. “Not a bad weapon to name yourself after, really.” She let the cheekiness roll on into pure gallows. “It definitely beats Crossbow.”

“Fuck you! My mom picked it for me!” he shouted. Buffy’s eyebrows went up and he hissed out, “Hatchet Christopher Downing. I had hippie parents, okay?”

“Fine by me,” she replied, keeping her voice even. If she had a nickel for every time in her life she’d had to explain her name – _Buffy Sainte-Marie, she’s a singer my mom liked _– she’d have earned at least enough for a decent latte. Though these days, with girls being named after_ her_, it was a different kind of ache thinking about the conversations they were going to have. “So, Hatchet, you mind explaining why you thought making a break for the mainland was a good idea?”

He clammed up, glaring at her, no longer struggling against the arms on his back and shoulders. Buffy looked at Drusilla, who crooned, “Poor darling went looking for dust, nary a care for himself or the rest. Sweet lamb,” she stroked his face. “You’ve not much longer to wait for peace.”

“Will he be okay?” someone asked.

“Hasn’t got a choice,” Spike intoned. “Getting through is the only way.” He crouched down next to Hatchet. “Can’t hack it, gonna find someone in the city happy to dust you, make the rest of them think about giving up, take a walk into the sun – not good. Make the humans think we don’t deserve to be here at all. Can’t be having that.”

“Fuck you,” Hatchet hissed. Drusilla snarled and yanked his hair, pulling his head back. “I’m not –” She dragged her nails across his cheek, spilling blood onto the sand and cutting off anything else he might have said.

“No way you could afford it,” Spike retorted scornfully. “You know I’m not wrong here. Anyone? Anyone else?” He stood up, scanning the crowd. “Anyone else want to get it all over with tonight?” He pointed at a burly vampire standing near the edge of the crowd and shouted, “You there, Brando!”

“My name’s not –”

“Not three hours ago you wanted someone what’d give you a way out of this. Well, guess what, we’ve got the grand dame battleaxe of Slayers here tonight!” It was Buffy’s turn to pick up what Spike was putting down, and she stepped forward, putting on a smile. Brando took a step back. “Right here, she’ll take you on, take you out, see what you’ve –”

He stopped because_ something_ forced him to move, pushing him and making him stumble and cry out in shock. Every one of the vampires felt it, too, rocking on their feet or practically getting dragged along by an outside force. Buffy stared, open-mouthed, as Spike scrambled forward on his hands and knees, as Hatchet and Dru and everyone else lost control from something that passed Buffy by in favor of the vampires. It didn’t last long, not more than ten seconds, but those were ten seconds of serious mojo.

“Nasty!” Drusilla shouted, leaping to her feet. “Nasty, dirty foolish wretches taking our bidding from us!”

“Bloody well knew it!” Spike shouted, running after her. Buffy followed them up the hill to – of course that’s where it came from. To the row house the humans had run into. The row house where all the philosopher conspirators were staying.

“She’s got it, pet,” Spike pressed, holding Drusilla back – gently, though. “Let her have at them so they’ll suffer instead of dying.”

Buffy mustered up all her remaining will power, staving off the desire to kick in a door two nights in a row. Instead of ripping it off its hinges, she pounded hard enough to make sure they knew exactly who it was.

“Buffy,” Spike called to her. “Don’t prove me wrong here.”

“I’ll do my best,” she ground out as the door opened to a long, pale face of an undergrad boy with barely enough testosterone to grow a scant mustache but too proud to shave it off no matter how much it’d improve his look.

“Did it work?” Tobias asked, after he let her in, barely glancing at the would-be nest gathered on the porch and hovering at the threshold. The lights were on, and the house had the dorm room feeling of people waiting to figure out how to settle in and where to put all their stuff, made stronger by lack of solid furniture.

“I think it did.” Buffy looked around at the group and gave herself the luxury of letting her temper seep into her voice. “I still want to know the details.” 

“Oh, good,” he said, oblivious to her tone, “we’d been told, you know, don’t do too much, the fallout might mess things up, but we figured a simple barrier’d be safe to throw up. Nothing too fancy about that to go too wrong.” He shrugged. “Better to make sure none of them tries to leave before we get everything figured out for what to do next, right?”

“Barrier,” Buffy repeated to Tobias. Say this for the whole pack of them: they were damn talented magicians. The talented ones were always the worst. The work came easy, so any solution to a big problem had to be just as easy, too. There were ten thousand things she wanted to say to them, shout at them, _scream _at them. She started with _you rank arrogant amateurs_ and went on from there, _do you understand how many people you’ve killed_, a roiling boil of words she took no pleasure in, _don’t you dare think you did this out of kindness,_ exhuming all her fury and laying it bare at their feet and being rewarded with fear finally making its way onto their faces.

“Barrier,” she explained to the vampires who’d gathered around the porch, none of them coming up the stairs to get close to the house itself. Not even Spike. “Something they dug up from some old medieval compendium that keeps demons contained. You’re not getting farther than a half-mile out in any direction, up, down, sideways. Great work there, everybody, real great work,” she called out over her shoulder. 

Buffy didn’t stick around to hear what he or anyone else inside had to say to defend themselves and started heading back up the hill. At the bend in the road by Valenstein’s place, she passed a small bush with pale pink flowers, something growing on the outskirts of the house’s gardens. It could’ve been Valenstein who planted them, or whoever had the house before her. They looked planted, not wild and left to grow free. The shock of color, bright even at this time of night, stopped her for a moment, and she wondered if they were what Spike had smelled before she pulled herself back to the here and now and kept walking until she got to the hospital and could share the news of the night.

Angel ground something out about trusting the group, most of the other vampires took it silently, a couple of them shouted, and Gerhard just laughed. “I’m surprised they didn’t put it into place when they put us all here. No, instead, it’s damn shoddy jailing. Once upon a time, I was held captive by people who _planned_ for escapees. It’s almost enough to make me feel nostalgic for when I was alive.”

Buffy wanted to curl up in bed with Spike. She wanted his arms around her, the solid, flat, cool shape of his body and all the planes and slopes of it holding her gently. Anchoring her in the world and whispering in her ear that he’d be around for her, he was here if she needed him. She knew him well enough to know he wasn’t going to impose an invitation onto Valenstein, and apparently, he wasn’t going to ask Dru to hypnotize one out of her, either. So the two of them made their way around the back of the house instead, up a ways and around, to get up the hill and past the hospital to see the Golden Gate Bridge twinkling between the hills and reflected on the water. There wasn’t much to say. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet, either.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

“Not so much wrong as –” He shook his head. “I’d worried about this. Pretty much this right here. When things were going south, farther south than I’d ever thought they might, I had to wonder. What if they don’t go through with it? What if they decide, let’s save some of them? Keep a few bloodsuckers around to make sure no one bloody well forgets what Slayers are for. Stick the last of us into blasted little zoo cages. Let people gawk at us after we’re bloody well made all safe for them. No more getting up close and personal to the world. No more running and hiding. More merciful if they’d wipe us all out and leave us to memory. Now, here we are. And I know it’s not the same. I know we’ll be heading back home when it’s all safe. It’s that it’s too much of a reminder.”

Buffy moved his arm over her shoulders, and he pulled her in close. “You sound like you’re doing okay,” she told him.

“I’ve got practice holding it together when things get rough,” he said quietly.

She knew he did. He still hadn’t told her much about the year they’d been separated – most of it spent in hiding once he’d escaped, running across Europe with half the Slayers on the continent hot on his trail. He’d managed to stay hidden enough, and safe enough, for long enough, that he’d been able to come out of hiding once the whole catastrophe was finally called off. Drusilla had stayed in hiding. Buffy would’ve granted her clemency for the help she’d given Spike in those southward months, but it was like that the moment Drusilla knew Spike was safe, she’d gone back to being disappeared.

“You think Hatchet had a sister named Arrow?” Buffy asked, prompting Spike to laugh the laugh of the tired: when it’s better to laugh than cry.

“What, Arrow Julie Downing? Better a sister named Arrow than one named Blue Dolphin.” She scrunched up her face at him and he laughed again, rubbing her shoulder. “Dawn always loved that kind of story. Read through both her shelves of it the summer you were gone.” He gave her a little smile. “Some good stuff in there.”

She leaned into his side, pressing her head against him._ It really is a beautiful view out here. _“Give her a call tomorrow. She’ll appreciate it.”

He pulled her in close. “Soon as my mobile’s all charged up.”


	15. a push and it's over

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Shoplifters of the World" by The Smiths.

The island wasn’t in a full-on lockdown. The humans could come and go as they pleased, more or less. More, because there wasn’t anything stopping them except geographic features and moral obligations. Less, because those moral obligations were pesky things to deal with and said geographic features were nasty to swim through when you hadn’t packed a swimsuit. Boats could come and go, and Spike had been right about the lack of tourists bringing out the birds and small animals. They lit up in the early morning, flying over the lawn and through the trees, while Buffy ate her salsa-less eggs on toast and smiled at Spike’s earlier message: _This lack of fresh towels is going to see management receiving a very sternly worded letter. _

She replied:_ Don’t hold back. _She brushed her teeth, stretched out, then gave up on yoga halfway through her usual routine and went for a run. A jog, really. A gentle, relaxing just-under-six-mile loop around the island, hitting that mark because of the slight elevation gain, that was more to combat the creeping restlessness than get in her daily cardio. Her body moved easily enough, the ache in her hip just an echo and her knees only mildly unhappy with the stress she was placing on them.

Beyond getting out and moving for a while, the run gave Buffy the chance to see how small the island was. Not even an hour and she was back at Valenstein’s house, prompting her to take another lap. She took the second time around more gently, occasionally stopping and lingering like a shameless tourist. She took in the old missile base, the East garrison and the rock quarry where Alcatraz’s prisoners had mined the stones for the Presidio, made use of a bathroom and a drinking fountain, and kept her eyes off the quarantine hospital as she jogged down the hill to Valenstein’s house – who was heading out on her own tour.

Valenstein got back a couple of hours later, arms full. She and the other rangers and staff had emptied out the café while Buffy had been busy showering, reading, and trying not to linger too much on the news. The best the morning had to offer had been seeing Lorne continuing his activism career with his coordination of the demon-human co-community relocation efforts. The worst was a Goltharin family whose kids had started pupating almost ten years early; she’d turned off the TV before it could go into details about the damage cocooning this young would do to them as adults. Impromptu groceries were a welcome reprieve.

“At this point, there’s no good reason to let the milk that’d go to tourist mochas spoil,” Valenstein explained, gently hefting a couple of tote bags onto the kitchen table. “Not when who knows how long it’ll be before the tourists come back. Bottles of wine and frozen meats, those can wait, but tomatoes and lettuce, they’re going to be written off anyway. We figured it might as well not go to waste.”

“I like your thinking,” Buffy said as she began unpacking one of the bags. “A good dose of pragmatism never hurts.” Valenstein nodded politely. “Hey, there’s an oyster bar on the island, right?”

“Yes,” Valenstein answered, “though it’s closed for the season.”

“I was just thinking, with everything else here, you’re two-thirds of your way to a hangtown fry. Relax.” She held up a hand. Valenstein looked ready to spring into action, kayak her way to the city and pick up the missing ingredients and be back in time for lunch. “It’s fine. I don’t actually want one. Bacon hasn’t been kind to me since I turned seventy.”

“Oh. I see.”

“And to be honest, I’ve never really liked oysters.”

“Me neither,” Valenstein admitted, quickly, before she remembered who she was talking to. Buffy smiled when she saw the moment Valenstein let herself forget, and went on, “Also, clams. Though it’s really any bivalve. When I got this posting, my friends all told me to order the chowder at Fisherman’s Wharf, but if you’re going to all that effort to disguise what you’re eating…”

“It’s the sourdough bowl that’s the main draw. Any soup’s better out of one of those.” Valenstein – _Suzanne_ smiled, and Buffy handed her another carton of eggs. “But then, why not just use a better soup?”

“Tomato,” Suzanne said, and Buffy sighed in remembrance of being able to eat them freely.

Dawn called around nine to tell Buffy that the full story had finally been released to the press. “No way did I see this coming so fast.”

“Neither did I,” Buffy breathed, looking back and forth between the newscaster’s face and Millicent’s picture. 

Neither did any of the vampires, either, when Buffy dropped by around ten. More of them were up and aware, which was an improvement, though the news that the public was on_ their_ side for a change probably wasn’t doing much for their sense of reality. Someone had leaked the information, and that someone had been Millicent, all hopped up on painkillers out in San Francisco, trying for penance through honesty. She’d explained everything that she’d hoped to accomplish and what she’d managed to do. Not how she’d done it, exactly, but the how wasn’t important right now. The why was the thing that got the public on the vampires’ side. The why that Millicent wanted, the rhyme and reason for her actions – and now that they had souls, the public wanted to know what could be done on their behalf.

“Get us fed, to start,” Angel pressed, his voice thin through Buffy’s phone. She’d put it on speaker and turned up the volume, and she still had to pull it in a little closer to make out the softer sounds. “Whatever happens is going to be easier when we’re not so hungry.”

“The butchers can’t deliver until tomorrow,” Robert protested. “There’s this – well, you know San Francisco is what it is, and there’s a few people saying…you can guess what they’re saying. It’d go through a hospital and it’d be here tomorrow, too, and –”

“No,” Angel said, flat and sharp and weary.

“Really?” Sutter almost laughed. “Because I’d think you’d jump on an offer like that. Everything donated freely and all.”

“Human blood’s the_ last_ thing any of ’em needs right now,” Spike growled. “Not with how they’re still all new to soul-having. Give them human blood when it’s this raw and fresh, it’ll do more harm than good.”

“We can wait another night for animal blood. Just as long as there’s plenty of it,” Angel said.

“Slaughter a dairy farm if you have to,” Spike chimed in. “Two nights’d be pushing it, though.”

“First thing tomorrow evening,” Buffy confirmed, locking herself into a promise she knew the world wouldn’t make easy to keep. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t try everything she could to make it happen. It was definitely a better use of her time and energy than throttling every human in the Bay Area who thought they could help by making things exponentially worse. There might only be about twelve of them. She could throttle twelve people by teatime, no problem.

Buffy settled for listening to Dahlia explain that they’d come up with a strategy and plan to get the area back to the usual levels of agreed-upon reality. 

“What’s the timetable?” Lani asked before Buffy could.

“We’ll begin the work of it this afternoon. Assuming that it goes well – it’s still a working theory at present, but the core principles should be sound.” Dahlia shrugged, sounding nearly hopeful.

There wouldn’t be any getting rid of the unreality or nullifying it by throwing accountants at it. Instead they were going to go for the next step in the containment process and try to stabilize the region by concentrating the unreality as much as they could. The working theory was to focus the unreality into smaller pockets, smaller spaces, siphon it off and away into the proper holding vessels and locations. Then there’d be the seeing-to of getting _those_ pockets and vessels contained and into the right hands to either make the best use of the energies within them or manage proper disposal.

The clean-up crews started around sundown that evening. Not long after, the vampires went out to stretch their legs, get a little fresh air, go on a guided tour of the buildings where Shen had been kept for years, long ago, that he led from Noam’s arms which Buffy passed on attending.

Late the next morning, she was enjoying the sensation of being the only person out on the beach by the old immigration station. There was nothing to disturb her, not even her phone, as she splashed in the water – though she wasn’t doing splashing so much as she was wading. Shoes left by the concrete stairs, jeans cuffed up to her knees, she walked tenderly until the cold water numbed her feet enough to keep her from wincing whenever she stepped on a particularly troublesome pebble. Wiggling her toes in the water, she dug in her heels whenever a strong wave came in to lap at her legs. The biggest ones were hardly strong enough to make a difference because the size of the beach cut them down to bonsai size, reducing them to almost nothing. It was almost like being at the shallow side of a community swimming pool when someone did a cannonball off the high-dive on the deep end. It wasn’t going to get her hair wet. Buffy stared at her feet underneath the water, taking in the way the surface distorted the colors, and how the sunlight dappled through the water. Everything made ripply and soft, smoothing decades right off her skin.

She’d missed Spike’s morning text message – _Sorry I wasn’t around to help with the oestrogen cream last night _– and two calls over the last twenty minutes, both from an unknown number with a local area code. _Good news won’t go bad; bad news can wait five minutes. _She toweled off her feet and put her shoes back on before replying to Spike – _Same, but I managed solo well enough_ – and returning the calls. Clive picked up on the fourth ring.

“It’s looking good,” he gushed. “No hitches so far, and everything’s coming along. It’s maybe a little slower than what we’d first thought, maybe not everything’s moving the way we wanted. We’re working through that, though, and using it to stay careful.”

“All very nice to hear,” Buffy told him as she walked back inland. “Any predictions on a timetable?”

“We don’t want to be presumptuous about that.”

“Of course.”

“What I can say, what I wanted to say to you earlier, is that however long it takes, it looks like we’ll be able to do a full and complete job of things.” He sounded almost surprised he was allowed to say it. “I know we haven’t sorted out the fine details of it, like how long it’ll take, but what we have works.”

“That’s fantastic to hear. So what are the fine details giving you trouble?”

“The timetable,” he said quickly. Too quickly.

“And?”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“Yeah-huh,” she said, channeling her inner California Girl before switching over to her Old Lady voice. “I’m not going to be upset at hearing bad news from you, Clive, I can promise that. I just want to make sure I know everything about what’s going on right now. I’m glad you wanted to share the good news with me. Maybe you could be kind enough to share the bad, too?” She asked in a falsely kind tone.

“Well,” he began, pitching apologetic, “to start with the bad, it’s something we’re trying to work out and maybe figure out a way it won’t be a problem.”

“Which means it’s not as bad as it could be.”

“We’ve got some trouble with the people.” Buffy excused herself, put the phone down on a picnic table, walked across the stretch of paved road, punched a hole in the concrete barrier, and walked back to her phone. “The process is going fine. We’re trying to go slow because – I know we said it’d be dangerous, and we got that part right. Right enough. It’s worse than what we’d first thought.”

Not worse over the course of half a day._ Considerably_ worse over the course of time it’d take to get Berkeley safe for people to live in again. Working from a distance, using as much safety gear and protective spells as they could, there was still feedback, bleed-off, unavoidable contamination, unsafe levels of exposure. Nobody had died yet. Two clean-up workers, both promising Watchers in training, got hit by a flare-up from an especially nasty pocket of instability they’d been trying to siphon. They’d come out of it alive, and still the same species, and that was probably the best to hope for when dealing with a level of reality as soft as Berkeley was right now. The pace got slowed down because no one wanted to stop, and no one wanted to move forward, either.

The blood came in around three o’clock, and she passed out the news along with the food. Based on the number and size of the coolers lugged by van across the island from the dock, there’d definitely be at least two units of cow per vampire. As long as everyone waited in line for their turn and fair share of it, at any rate.

Gerhard, Spike, Drusilla, and Angel, along with the other three early subjects – Ignacio, Qing Shan, and Salim – were seeing to the queuing. The seven of them were managing to keep the peace, even as hungry as all the vampires had to be after so long without properly feeding. Get a pouch, step away, let the next vampire step forward, repeat as needed. The remnants of the Whirlwind and Gerhard took care of the order, while the others made sure everything got cleaned up, collecting all the empty plastic pouches sucked completely dry.

A few of the more alert vampires were feeding the ones who weren’t much better than corpses. Buffy knew they were doing the absolute best thing they could under the circumstances: carefully cutting themselves and pressing slack mouths to necks or arms, hoping instinct would kick in and get a positive response. It still made her squirm. The fact that it worked didn’t help her feel better. The only blood they had to offer was thin, what faint life it had already mostly filtered out, and it was the action of the feeding that brought the others out of the soul-wreaked catatonia they’d been in for days now. They curled and wrapped themselves around the offering vampires, swallowing deeply, bringing themselves back into the world. They were whispered to softly and held gently in return. Buffy couldn’t watch the intimacy for long and turned back to the front of the line, where Gerhard and Angel were swapping out another pair of empty coolers for filled ones. Gerhard still had her bandages on and was taking full use of them by reaching out through the door and tapping the shoulder of one of the people standing guard in the full sunshine. He jumped about fifteen feet in the air but got the message. Buffy pitched in, taking one end of one full cooler with two men on the other, and lugging it backwards into the house.

“Have you eaten yet?” Buffy asked. “Any of you?”

“We’re waiting to make sure everyone else does first.” Angel bent down and snapped open the latches.

“It’s important to set a good example,” Gerhard explained as she handed out a fresh pouch. “Show by doing and all that.” She turned back at Buffy and shook her head. “Look, we’re not going to starve ourselves to make a point. We’re going to eat, and we’re going to enjoy it when we do. It’s just not our turn yet.”

It didn’t take a whole lot of time – maybe two hours, start to finish – before the ones in charge got to sit down with meals of their own. They stayed close to the entryway, the last coolers being leaned against or used as impromptu benches. Buffy watched from outside, seeing how they all ate: a couple chugged their blood, a couple sipped it delicately, and everyone enjoyed it. When you were hungry, all you wanted was to eat. Once you’d eaten, then you could see to things like talking, and telling jokes, and laughing. She could nearly make out the laughing if it was loud enough. Spike was sitting on one of the coolers, telling a story with his hands; Drusilla was sitting next to him, her back to Buffy and the line of her posture all focused on Spike.

Not moving in closer. Not trying to get his attention. Looking at him, watching him, and enjoying looking at and watching and listening to him. He did turn to her a couple of times, and she nodded, possibly adding something, before he went on with the story.

Buffy swallowed down the bile and stepped away, heading up the mountainside to catch the last bit of the afternoon sun. They’d all looked happy. As happy as they could be right now, and if telling a story with Drusilla there with him got Spike happy enough to tell a story like that, all the tension in his body gone, she’d let him have it without making a fuss about it. Who knew how long it’d be before he had even this much cheer again.

They wouldn’t be able to get the vampires another big meal like this tomorrow. A few days from now or next week, sure. At least two more times. Then people who could move on, would move on. This would become a long-term problem without the sort of attention it had when everything was new and fresh and it seemed as though it could be solved within four to six business days. They’d been at this for thirty-six hours now. Buffy wasn’t holding her breath, not when there was Berkeley itself to deal with, not when it was hopefully possible that the souled vampires could adjust and manage. Maybe not now, but eventually. For vampires, eventually could be a long time coming. They could take the time to wait.

They knew that, too. At least two of them knew from long experience. Six, potentially, could say it in grand total. Depending on how those newest four were feeling.

Buffy herself wasn’t feeling up to waiting for_ eventually_ to arrive. She didn’t let it show that evening after the day’s clean-up work was gone over in fine detail, mostly out of professional courtesy and because the League knew she’d find out one way or another. Dahlia might as well tell her and everyone else personally. Like how the setbacks were disappointing, the crews were working on overcoming them, and how there might be a way around certain issues and concerns. It wasn’t the methods that were the problem, it was the people attempting to put those methods into practice.

“It’s not something we can keep throwing bodies at,” Clive said, then stopped to consider, his eyes roving around the visitor’s center meeting room. “Well, we _could._ It’d take a lot of bodies, is the thing. If people volunteered for it, then yes, we’d make sure they’re as safe as we can get them and send them on out, but we can’t order anyone.”

“Gone are the days of such national pride,” Gerhard droned over Buffy’s phone. “It used to be if there was a big clean-up needed, people lined up because they knew it was for the greater good.”_ The greater good, the greater good, shut it. _Buffy shook her head to get her mind away from British action-comedies and back on track. “I’m curious – you’re saying it’s pretty much everyone except Slayers and vampires who’ve been hit by all this _softness_ in the air?”

“Yes,” Dahlia confirmed. “Demons and humans alike. The Slayers’s resistance is one thing, except there’s nowhere near enough Slayers to spare – they’re already where they’re needed, and the region’s so stable at present – no, stable _enough,_ I should say. It’s stable enough we can’t assign the number needed to see to the ongoing efforts here and take them off their field assignments elsewhere.”

“Of course not,” Buffy murmured.

“And leaving the city as is, is itself not an option,” Sutter pointed out. “So where are we now?”

“Where we are now, is trying to figure out who might be both willing to help and capable of providing what’s needed.” Dahlia sighed. “With enough people, even assuming regular setbacks and problems, it might take as little as six years.”

“Six years!” Sutter shouted, slamming his palms down on the table. Robert and the rest of the conspirators said nothing, looking sick. Buffy had to admit they wore their guilt well. 

“Six years to return it to human habitability is downright speedy,” Buffy nearly snapped at Sutter. “We’re talking best-case scenario with that.”

“I have two questions,” Gerhard said.

“Go ahead,” Buffy told her.

“How long would it take for all the energy to dissolve, or dissipate, whatever it’s going to do, so that reality comes back to normal on its own?”

Clive and Dahlia looked at each other. She nodded at him, and he set his lips thin. “At least eight centuries,” Clive answered. “At the rate it’s currently moving.”

Buffy let her face drop into her hand. Sutter went green, Dahlia looked like she wanted to cry, and Robert tried to shrink down in his chair. Buffy watched everyone around the room try, and fail, to deal with the hard number. 

“Fuck,” Lani said. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Yeah, that’s…” Clive shook his head. “That was pretty much what I said.”

“This sort of thing’s happened before.” Dahlia sounded like she wanted to be comforting and knew what she was saying wasn’t working but didn’t have anything else to offer. “Not often, but enough we could make an accurate estimate. Two sites in Australia, a mountain in the Peruvian Andes, the –”

“She didn’t say it’d be this,” Claire whispered. “Millicent told us it would _help_. It would _fix_ things and make things better and help everyone. She told us we had a mission and a _purpose_ and she – she _told_ us. And we did it, we did everything, and this – this isn’t any of that.” Claire looked at Buffy, her voice climbing higher. “This isn’t what Millicent told us.” She could’ve been one of Buffy’s great-nieces, long wavy hair and strong eyebrows, fresh out of college and ready to take on the world, and Buffy refused to let her heart break for her.

“I’m sure she did,” Gerhard said, her voice gentle. “Right. Right. Okay, eight centuries. My second question. How many bodies is enough bodies?”

“I’m sorry?” Dahlia leaned in towards the phone.

“You said, with enough people, you could clean it up in six years. How many is enough? Teams, groups, work gangs, however you’ve got them scheduled in whatever set of rotating shifts you’ve picked out. How many is enough?”

“Why do you ask?” Natalie demanded.

“Because there’s a hospital building full of volunteers sitting right here, that’s why,” Gerhard answered. “Every single one of them fully and happily resistant to whatever side-effects could get thrown at them. Would they be enough?”

Even Sutter was quiet.

“Hello?” Gerhard said, after a few heartbeats of silence. “Hello?”

“Yes!” Clive called out. “Loud and clear as a matter of fact. Yes, we heard you.”

“Okay,” she said. “You heard me, you know what we’re willing to do –”

“What, _all _of you?” Tobias asked.

“Yes, all of us. Why is that so hard to understand?”

“Excuse me for being suspicious about _vampires,_” Sutter scoffed._ You’re excused, _Buffy thought. “I’m also curious about your angle here.”

“No angle. No trick. We’ll put in the effort it takes, for as long as it takes, because we’re the best people to pull this off. Six years, sixty years, we’ll commit to the long haul. Give us the shovels or the timey-wimey detectors or whatever tools we need in our hands, point us in the right direction, and we’ll head off.”

“That’s…” Dahlia swallowed. “That’s _tremendously _generous of you to offer.”

“Thank you. We try.”

“Though much as I hate to say it, I agree with Councilman Sutter in wanting to know what it is you want out of this. Presumably being allowed off the island,” she paused, and Gerhard gave a noise of agreement, “but is there anything else?”

“Not much, no. Just one thing. We’ll all do this clean-up on one condition.”

“And that would be?” pressed Sutter.

“Break the curse and take away our souls.”


	16. it takes your mind again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Exile Vilify" by The National, which is also the song referenced within the chapter.

Buffy felt her heart flutter. 

“I’m sorry,_ what?” _Claire asked.

“That’s our _one_ condition we’ve all decided on,” Gerhard stated plainly. “We want you to break the curse you put on us and get rid of the souls we have because of it.”

“Yes, but is that…”

“After everything we did to get you souls, you want to get_ rid of them?”_ Lani shouted, hitting her fist against the table and cracking it to the edge. “How can you fucking _ask for that?”_

“No, _you_ listen to _me_, you little motherfucker, how can you sit there and see what happened because of _everything _you did and not think, oh hey, maybe that _wasn’t_ a good idea, maybe we should –” There were some sounds on the other end Buffy couldn’t quite make out: a scuffle, an argument, and then, clear silence. She ended the call and slid her phone away.

“All right,” Robert said quietly.

“Yes. That.” Dahlia shivered and pressed her fist against her mouth. “It’s certainly…yes.”

“But…” Claire closed her eyes, wiped her face, and started again. “If we say no, if we wait, maybe they won’t – we always thought, give them some time, they’ll adjust, they’ll understand. We would’ve talked to them if there hadn’t been – if we’d known to only do it one at a time, we…Millicent talked to Gerhard right after and I was there when she explained, and if we give it a little more time to understand, maybe…”

“There’s no_ maybe,_” Buffy spoke. Declared, really. “It can take a vampire centuries to adjust to a soul. Even if they only need a few years to come to terms with it, there’s no guarantee_ any_ vampire’s going to come around to accept their soul as a good thing when it’s forced onto them. What you did was more than a punishment. Whatever they’ve_ done_, they didn’t do anything to deserve this. What they’re asking for is to earn forgiveness the old-fashioned way. By doing the work of making themselves worth forgiving.” She stood up, making slow eye contact around the table. “I say, let’s do this.”

Everyone returned her gaze. Some angry, some sad, some sick, some numb. Buffy didn’t let herself shake. Core tight, shoulders back, play the part of Buffy Summers. Play the part and maybe they’ll listen and not ask questions. Show everyone how willing she was to take the responsibility onto her shoulders, and maybe they’d give it to her.

“It’s something you can do, right?” She looked around the table again. “No need to give every one of them a moment of perfect happiness. Say the right thing, use the right ritual objects, and the souls come flying out.” Oliver looked away. Perfect. “Oliver?” Buffy asked. He flinched. “Is there something you’d like to share?”

“It’s…yes. We could do that,” he allowed. “It wouldn’t be impossible. The Kalderash had a clause in the original curse in case they had to break it. I don’t know why, but they did. So, yes. We definitely could. We just never thought we’d ever have to.”

“Magic’s always stronger with a back door,” Buffy echoed the words from an old memory.

“Yeah, one of Rosenberg’s main principles,” he told her with a smile.

“Of course it is,” she said softly.

“Her work was _foundational _to our whole project. She gave us so much of what we needed. We tried to adhere to her integrated magic theories as much as we could in the –” Oliver looked at her face and dropped his grin, his voice going from cheerful to small. “Sorry. Not the time, right?”

“Very much not,” Buffy told him. She could imagine Willow’s precise mix of flattered and outraged at what her theoretical work was being applied to, and how she’d have never let something like this come to pass if she even had a whiff of a hint of it. She also knew it was only loss and fondness almost fifty years gone that made her think_ Willow could’ve cleaned Berkeley up by now all by herself. _“That means you’ll do it?”

“Hang on, hang on,” Sutter jumped in. “I’d like to say something, I’d like to ask if it’s wise to get rid of the souls of these vampires. You know, the one thing keeping them from eating us.”

“_Not_ the one thing,” Buffy turned to him and didn’t feel any delight in seeing him blanch. “Never just the _one_ thing. It’s never just the soul. The soul doesn’t actually stop them from being able to eat people. It just makes it distasteful.” The grimaces at the pun pleased her down to the soles of her feet, inappropriate as it might have been.

“Councilman, at present it’s _un-_wise not to take them up on their offer,” Dahlia pressed. “If this is what they’re willing to undergo in order to aid, given the scope of the issue, it seems a fair exchange.”

“I’m for it,” said Clive.

“What, are we voting on this or something?” Robert asked.

“No,” Buffy told him. “I’m just waiting on everyone to get onto the same page and understand this is the best thing we can do, considering what’s available. I know a lot of you think it’s a bad idea. But we don’t have any good ideas, and this one’s the best bad idea we have.” She didn’t let herself take in a deep breath and instead kept talking, “Do you have everything you need for this? Sage, small bones?”

“I think we do. I’ll check what we’ve got with us,” Manisha nodded. “And if we don’t, it shouldn’t be a problem to get any of it.”

“Good,” Buffy said. “If you need anything, let one of the staff know, we’ll see about getting it to you by tomorrow at the latest. Tonight’s the best night for this.”

“Why tonight?” Orozco asked. 

“Because they already ate today, and they’re still full.” Buffy held his gaze and stared him down, doing her best to say without words that someone who couldn’t figure that out wasn’t worthy to stand in her presence.

“Oh.”

“All right, then.” She nodded. She stepped back and pushed her chair in. “If that’s everything, I think we’re done here.” It probably wasn’t, so she left before anyone could say otherwise.

Outside, she took the long way around back to the west garrison. Not so much dawdling or meandering as making each step count. If anyone needed her, let them come and find her. Buffy wasn’t ready to go out looking for anyone. No, she was ready to step away from playing the all-knowing general and go back to being herself. Nowadays, since she had to play the part so rarely, it got more and more tiring. A sense memory she didn’t have to use so much anymore. It always ached when she had to play the part, even when she’d been doing it every day, and especially now, when it’d been nearly fourteen years of field retirement come this June.

Even though she was ready, the world wasn’t, not yet, and that was the crux of the nature of playing the part right there.

Ramesh waved from just beyond the guards at the threshold and welcomed her inside. Gerhard and the rest of the merry little gang, the magnificent seven, were in one of the little back offices. It still had the fixtures from when it’d been a hospital – not like the stripped-down former wards where there were only some discolored spots on the floor to show where beds had been. This room still had the sinks, the cabinets, the stuff that said what the room had been used for, once. Right now, it gave Spike, Drusilla, and Ignacio a place to sit with their feet swinging, and the rest something to lean against.

Buffy didn’t like what it said that these were about the only vampires who didn’t tense to get up when she came into the room.

“Pretty wild phone call,” she remarked.

“Yeah, sorry about that.” Gerhard tapped her bandaged fingers against her knee. “Look, if Lani wants an apology, bring her here and I’ll give her one face-to-face.”

“She’ll be fine.” Buffy hoped she would be. “That’s not what I came here to talk about.”

“What, then?” Qing Shan asked, her eyes hopeful.

“The main topic.”

“The un-souling,” Ignacio breathed.

“Is it un-souling or de-souling?” Spike mused. “I’d say _de,_ what with being_ re_-souled and all.”

“It’s always important to be precise about these things,” Angel said tonelessly. Drusilla kicked him in the shoulder, lightly. He gently batted her foot away.

“Whatever the wording, the topic itself is why I’m here,” Buffy told them. “And I’m pretty sure they’re going to agree to it.” All of them stared at her. Sitting up, drawing back, eyes going wide and intakes of air.

“How – how’d you do it?” Salim asked.

“She gave them exactly the right words,” Drusilla purred. “Nasty, scared little fools don’t dare question the Generalissima’s voice. Believe all that’s said, want or no. Got your hands full round the world, haven’t you? And you know how to hold without it cracking open.”

“Did you know that being all psychic?” Ignacio asked.

“No, I just know her well.”

“It’s a skill she’s learned,” Spike explained, then turned to Buffy. “When were they thinking?”

“I said tonight’s best because you ate this afternoon.”

“We appreciate it,” Gerhard said. “You don’t want a bunch of unsouled vampires running around hungry.”

“Desouled,” Spike corrected with a smile.

“Whatever,” Qing Shan snapped.

“Hey,” Angel chided.

“Enough,” Buffy told all of them. “If it’s not tonight, it’ll be tomorrow. I don’t think we can get a rush order for another blood delivery by then, so – did you have any left over?”

“A bit,” said Gerhard. “There was enough for everyone to have seconds, but not thirds, so we’re saving last couple dozen for the ones who’ll need it later. Shen’s healing up fine, by the way. He almost felt his toes today.”

“How’s your arm?” Buffy asked.

She considered the question, wiggling her hand in the air. “It’s still pretty numb right now. I’m hoping the fingernails won’t itch too much when they start growing back.”

“Itching means healing,” Salim smiled.

“Thank you for the reminder.” She looked back at Buffy. “They’re taking the deal, though, right?”

“Soulless vampire clean-up crew.”_ Good name for a rock band, _Buffy thought.

“Good. Good. Make use of the expendable bodies for the worst work.” She leaned her head back and sighed, then shifted it forward. “What are they going to call us? We’re dead, so biorobots doesn’t really work here.”

“Necrorobots?” Quin Shan suggested.

“Necrobots,” Spike said, grinning. “It’s got a ring to it.”

“So when is it happening?” Ignacio asked. “Nine? Midnight?”

“I’ll call when I find out.” 

Buffy called the vampires about forty minutes later after a consultation in the dormitory building to tell them _thirty minutes past sundown, so about ten, give or take a few._ The response she got was thankful, all full of gratitude, and a promise they’d all rest up for it by napping through what was left to the day.

Buffy took the vampires’ advice, stopping long enough to take off her shoes and set an alarm, then flopping facedown on the bed and nuzzling into the pillows without even getting under the covers. Ideal nap-state. She drifted and dozed, letting her body rest. Breathing gently, with the window barely open, the room was warm and the breeze was brushing across her arm and there was the feeling that this was how things could have gone. Back at home and Spike somewhere else in the house. Or they were on a long stay somewhere. Not just a speaking engagement, a vacation like normal couples had, and she was dozing in bed to rest up for the night and Spike was…Spike was resting up too. She grumbled to herself and adjusted on the bed, but the buzz was gone.

He _was _resting up, though. Not all that far away. Just far enough away she couldn’t feel him, and with plenty of other vampires around to keep him company. It wasn’t just Drusilla there. And it was enough distance she couldn’t feel which part of the gentle rumble at the bottom of her teeth was Spike. At home, she didn’t have to think about the radius of the Slayer alarm system. When she was out on field missions, one girl in all the world or one of many, the League as legion, she hadn’t thought about distance or specifics much, either. Having it around and on was enough. Buffy knew she could look up experiments and test results and get a decently thorough set of numbers for her to know the statistical Slayer average, and she grumbled and readjusted on the bed again.

Breath in…and breathe out. Breathe in…breathe out. Slowly. Focus on a song, let the lyrics and the music flow. How did that one…that song in the puzzle game Dawn loved by that band Buffy loved…how did the piano…one note at a time, one note, another, let the music build…The melody thrummed along, and as she let the singer sing, as she let the violin play, she felt her heartbeat adjust to the memory of his voice. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat. She could feel her body laying heavy on the bed. Buffy let her mind flow along. She felt herself drifting off into meditation, going loose inside her body. A deep breath, a deeper breath. Her thoughts floating gentle. Her body standing on a gravel path. She focused on the trees around her. California trees, craggly-branched and heavy-barked. Her fingers tailed through the tall dry grass, walking down a broken path along past faded signs. The words were clear but she couldn’t read them. She tried to comprehend, and saw the meaning wasn’t for her to know. They looked like normal letters written backwards, like names of places she’d never go. She turned away to walk to the older buildings, ruins, fallen into disrepair and shambles. They were ghosts of buildings. There were only ghosts in the buildings. Ghosts were souls without form, souls without endings. Ghosts she knew, could hear – soft sounds, laughter, happiness. Ghosts that were happy, at last, that someone could hear them. Ghosts that told her the names of all the places lost to people, welcome to foxes, welcome to her. The ghosts gathered and gave their farewells as she gave them all her last goodbyes. Ghosts that knew how to see her off when it was time for her to go. One last night among the ruins. Ghosts and foxes both saying farewell to –

Her phone buzzed, and Buffy gave a full-body jolt upwards. She threw her arm out to grab her phone and turn off the alarm, having to keep tapping the screen until her thumb made contact with the big red button. Silence loomed through the room, which she welcomed. The voices of the ghosts were already fading, and she wiped away the tears that had come from hearing them.

One quick search later for a big backwards uppercase R, and she learned she’d been reading Cyrillic. She’d met her share of Slavic-speaking Slayers, and none of them were on the island right now. It hadn’t looked like anywhere she’d ever been. It hadn’t felt dangerous, either, and _that_ pushed her to not try for any more dozing. Dreams like that usually felt like the voice of doom, and those she knew to pay attention to. Not so much with this one, without any doom to speak of, except the sense of something that had long ago happened. There was definitely waiting for something, though. A waiting for something she couldn’t figure out that made her step outside for the last few minutes of the day’s sunshine and stare at her hands in the light.

For all the farewells, it hadn’t felt sad. Not while she’d been dreaming it. This one had felt like…it’d felt like she’d been someone who’d finally been ready to say goodbye.


	17. history is made to seem unfair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "I Remember California" by R.E.M.

All that was needed to break the Kalderash curse was someone with the appropriate amount of mojo to say the right words in the right order, with the proper oomph behind them. Of course, breaking this _many_ curses at once meant a _lot_ of oomph and a lot of someones saying the right words all at the same time. It was almost a good thing that this particular group had plenty of experience working together. Almost.

The only thing they’d needed to do was borrow the visitor center’s office printer for a half-hour. Once each of the spellcasters had a copy in hand, they were good to go.

The vampires, not so much. Not that they weren’t ready and willing, that none of them didn’t want this to happen to them, and as much as each of them wanted it over with, not a single one of them was exactly willing to trust the process. If the person who’d hurt you promised to make it all better, there was going to be an honest question about believability. That, and the uncertainty. Nobody could help them out with that. Almost nobody.

Millicent had been dead-on right about one thing: having someone around who’d been through it all before made it easier for everyone else. Buffy could allow her that.

“I can’t tell you it’ll be pleasant,” Angel began. He stood by the stairs of the main ward, among and not above, pitching his voice to carry all through the building. Grand speechifying, as practiced through the ages. “The moment of loss is painful. You all know how it gets into you? Living inside you?” A rumble went through the room that Buffy could hear standing near the doorway. “It doesn’t want to come out. Even when you know it’s coming, even when you know this is what’s supposed to be happening, that moment is going to be a surprise. You know how hard it is to remember pain.”

The old wound throbbed for the first time in decades. _He’d never told me it’d hurt._ But this wasn’t a time for old sorrows. Tomorrow, maybe. Tonight she let it flow through her and away.

Spike and Drusilla were standing beside Buffy, him with arms crossed over his chest while he tapped his fingers, her with hands clasped behind her back and head tilted slightly. He leaned over and whispered something below human hearing into Drusilla’s ear, making her giggle. Buffy knew it wouldn’t be worth it to ask.

“What’s so funny?” she whispered to Spike.

“I just said, big talk coming from Mister The Branding Iron Is Your Friend.” He sang-song it, and Drusilla giggled again.

“Seville was so grand, wasn’t it?” she murmured to Spike, who smiled back, making Buffy’s stomach clench.

And – okay. Good for them to be able to laugh about their past together.

“It’s going to be different for all of you,” Angel went on, not having noticed. “I’m not going to say anything about what we deserve, or what we’ve earned. Nothing about penance or atonement or redemption. I’m not even going to say you should tough it out a century or two and then see how you feel about it before rushing into anything.” A happier rumble flowed through the vampires. “I’m going to say that even if it hurts, the moment after that – the pain _will_ be gone. And you’ll still be the person, the_ person_, you are right now. The person who made the agreement and arrangement to have their soul removed from them. When the moment comes, after the pain’s gone, remember _why _you made that arrangement. And think about how they’ll treat us, how they’ll _think_ of us, if we don’t honor the terms that we’ve agreed to.” He looked out over the small, cramped crowd. “Is there anything else?”

There wasn’t. There was just leaving the hospital and walking out across the island to the nearest big open space available, which happened to be the parade area of the west garrison. Releasing a soul from a person didn’t necessarily come with a massive outpouring of energy, or else pretty much every battlefield since the beginning of war would have more to show for itself than the usual accumulation of bodies. However, breaking a curse generally came with side effects. No one was completely certain what would happen if this many curses got broken at once, especially in an area already fairly well saturated with background magic, other than it was probably a bad idea to try it indoors. 

So, a big open space, to make sure there was enough breathing room in case something went wrong.

_At least they’re all together outside. _That was about the only improvement on seeing the vampires all crammed in together in the old ALS HQ. Being up close and personal to the agitation and worry on all their faces wasn’t making it any easier to wait, no matter how nice a thing – comparatively speaking – Buffy knew what they were all waiting for.

This many vampires together still rang a big, blaring Slayer alarm, and Buffy watched how Lani, Natalie, and Fiona were also dealing with it. Which was to say, pretty badly. She didn’t blame them. Her skin was going all goosebumps, and she clenched her hands to fight off the feeling of needing to wrap her fingers around something. They were fighting their own instincts as well as they could, although Buffy could still see them fidgeting and doing a poor job of tamping down their restlessness. Instinct did best when listened to carefully and tempered with experience. She excused herself from small talk with Suzanne over what they’d do when this was all over and walked over to make idle talk with the three other Slayers instead. 

Mostly asking them how they were doing and to be honest with her, please, were they really feeling okay? Because Buffy was starting to feel not so great, and she was sorry they hadn’t been sleeping all that well, but they’d all be back in their own beds soon.

“We’re going to need a volunteer.” Robert swallowed and looked around at the assembled vampires. “We know what to do, we’re just not exactly sure what’s going to happen. Who’s willing to go first? Anyone?”

Silently, deliberately, Gerhard stepped out of the crowd, bandaged hand raised high above her head, nearly flying a white flag against the night. She crossed her arms, looked the spellcasters over, and asked, “Is there anything I’ve got to do to get ready for this?”

“Just stand there,” Robert told her, and began chanting.

The last time Buffy had been around for the Kalderash curse to break and a vampire to lose their soul, she’d been asleep. She’d never been a very deep sleeper, not even on_ that_ night, so she knew it couldn’t be a hugely spectacular event that came with a firework show.

It came with a cry. 

A cry of elemental pain, and Buffy knew something about crying out because the pain was so great.

Everyone drew back from Gerhard as she dropped to her knees, her hands and feet, sounds flying out towards the uncaring sky as the pain of having her soul ripped out went on and on and_ on _because souls never wanted to leave, they wanted to stay, even inside a vampire they wanted to stay and to be told to come back and leave again instead of staying was so much to bear, to have to carry, and this would be happening to all of the vampires here tonight – no wonder they all drew back from Gerhard as she screamed. 

Alone, she screamed.

Alone, she stopped, and a stillness settled in her. 

Gerhard drew herself up onto her knees. She stared down at her hands, really looking at them, like she’d forgotten they were there. She looked at Robert, at Buffy, at the other humans watching closely, at the other vampires standing nearby. Buffy couldn’t hear her say anything. She could see Gerhard’s mouth moving, and the way her face rose and changed from someone used to pain to someone in a state completely unlike being in pain.

Yet somehow missing the presence of that pain.

Gerhard stood up, brushed her knees off, and said, very softly, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Robert managed.

She looked to Tobias, standing next to Robert and holding one of the extra Thesulan Orbs. “I take it that worked.”

“Yeah, yeah it did, definitely it did,” Tobias confirmed, almost sadly, as he held the Orb carefully. “One soul’s off and on its way again.”

Gerhard nodded, and turned around to the other vampires. Her gaze drifted over them as she tried to take in each face, an echo of sorrow shining through her eyes, knowing what each of them would be feeling soon. Then she swallowed, steeling herself. And grinned.

“Turns out he was right.” She jerked a thumb towards Angel like a teenager in every bad American movie. “Getting your soul ripped out of you hurts. It hurts worse than when it gets put inside you. It hurts way more than dying. But when it’s over and it’s out, all you’re left with is the memory of the pain. You can get through past that moment. I promise you, all of you, that you can get through it. You _will_ get through it. All of you. There’s that moment when you realize the pain is gone and you’ll still be here. Can I ask you to meet that moment with grace?”

“Yes,” came a voice. 

“Yes,” came another voice. 

They could, they would, and Buffy was finally happy she didn’t have her hearing aids with her as fourteen voices chanted through archaic Latin and Romanian declinations and hundreds of vampires screamed together loud enough to be heard probably all the way in San Francisco. Knowing the pain would come didn’t make it less. Knowing it would be over soon didn’t make it easier. Buffy’s fingers curled and clenched the air because that moment was so far away and she could_ stop this_, she could _end _their pain, that was what she was here on Earth to do and if they didn’t stop screaming someone would have to force it to be over because that moment was so far away.

The moment finally arrived. 

It arrived in quiet, with a few final whimpers when the deep pain ended just before it became a memory. Stepping to their feet and holding themselves up without the weight they’d nearly grown used to bearing, and the humans took a step back as the vampires look up at them with all their eyes open and bright.

And some of them golden.

They leaped at her, roaring and howling. Buffy, the other Slayers, the spellcasters. Trying to leap, at least, because all they managed was halted, jerking movement as the other vampires around grabbed at them before they could get far. No time for being surprised: time for grabbing a hair stake, time for putting herself between the humans and the vampires, time to stare in wonder as the vampires turned on their own. The vampires trying to get to the humans were vastly, greatly outnumbered by the ones trying to stop them. They fought each other in groups, many against one, not for the sake of fighting but_ for what was right_. They screamed again, still because of pain: screaming that they remembered exactly how bad the pain had been and that they should be able to show the humans exactly what that pain was.

Buffy stood between the vampires and the spellcasters, one eight-inch piece of finely polished hardwood with the tip kept magically sharp enough to draw blood pulled out of her bun and held up at the ready, just in case she needed to turn a vampire without a soul into dust. Which she did, because one of them kicked themselves free and managed that flying leap at her.

She grabbed, she spun, and her hair stake found its way home. The smell of dust and the rush of battle almost made her feel young again. Though it wasn’t much of a battle, when all the dust settled; no real punching or kicking, no blows traded. No dramatic and heroic rescues needed.

Gerhard looked at Buffy across the calm, quiet field. Her bandages were ripped, dangling off her arm, but she didn’t tear them away. “Sound off!” she shouted. “Who’s gone?”

The names rang out: vampires Buffy had met, vampires she’d gotten to know, vampires she’d barely so much as glanced at. She couldn’t shout out any. Buffy hadn’t known who she’d dusted, just like the old days. They figured it out soon enough; all told, nineteen were done in and ended. Just nineteen to cause a lot of chaos. Not nearly as much as if they hadn’t been surrounded by vampires who didn’t want to see their unlives go up into dust. A few vampires wiped their faces dry, and Buffy almost wished she felt worse about them. Twelve of them done in by each other. Only seven by Slayers, and it was the smell of the dust – living ash – that she knew Lani and the rest were responding to just like she was. The Slayer’s purpose was almost forgotten these days, and people only remembered it under the worst of times. And the worst of times could happen every day.

Gerhard strode up the hill and stood in front of Robert, keeping a respectful distance. “Now that that’s finished, do you think you could go ahead and call Dahlia, let her know we’re ready to get started tomorrow?”

“You – you want me to what?”

“It’s not like I’ve got my phone with me,” she retorted. “Also, tell her it’s three hundred and thirty now. We had a little trouble with the whole curse-breaking thing, but it’s all sorted out now.”

“You’re not serious with this,” Claire demanded, baffled. “You’re expecting us to go on with it? After you tried to eat us?”

“Yes,” Gerhard said flatly.

“Yes,” Tobias echoed her.

“Yes,” she said again.

“They tried to_ eat us!”_ Tobias shouted.

“And they’re gone. What’s your_ point?”_ she asked. “Yeah, a few vampires tried to eat you tonight. They’re dust now. Forget about them. _Fuck them_. The rest of us are willing and ready to honor the deal we made. You held up your end of things and got the souls out of us. Now it’s our turn to clean up the rest of the mess you made. We’ll do the dirty work of fixing your mistakes. Tomorrow. Get us off the island, back to Berkeley, tell us where to go and what to do, and we’ll do it.” She took a deep breath to refill her lungs, giving the humans a cold, firm stare while she did. “Because we’re capable of being the kind of _people _who do that.” She stood there, looking at them with a solid, unflinching stare, and the return question hung unspoken in the air, _are you?_

“I’ll make the call,” Robert finally gave in. Collective relief slid through the field, and they began making their way up the hill back to the hospital. The vampires walked quietly, not even talking to each other. The humans shuffled around a bit, uncertain of their place.

“Hey,” Angel breathed, looming up beside Claire. “Are you doing all right?”

“Yeah, I think so.” She shook her head. “I think – I mean, I’m okay. I don’t know – were you friends with any…any of the ones that dusted? I’m sorry if you were.”

“Oh,” he murmured. “You don’t fight vampires much these days, do you?”

“Not really,” she replied quietly. “You’re pretty tame these days.”

“It’s really a shame. It used to be everyone remembered what their role was in the world.” He sighed. “Now, it’s like everyone’s forgotten.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing we don’t all know it.” Buffy sighed and let her shoulders drop. “I’d say it means the world’s changed for the better.” Angel shrugged, and turned back to Claire, who seemed flattered at his attention. He did have that effect when he wanted to. Buffy let the moment pass and turned to Tobias. “So it all worked, then? Everyone’s accounted for?”

“Yes,” he confirmed, holding up the Orb. “Three hundred and fifty souls, gone off to the great beyond.” He grinned. “The scaling-up worked perfectly.”

“You ever wonder where – _wait_, what do you mean?”

“I mean, after we did it for one vampire to make sure we knew how it worked, we did it for the rest of the souls we’d gotten down to Earth. So this big batch of broken curses we just performed was three hundred and forty-nine vampires at once.”

“Hang on.” Three hundred and forty-nine, three-four-nine. “You’re not counting Gerhard in there?”

“No.”

“So shouldn’t it be three hundred and forty-eight?” He blinked. “Does that say how many souls _total_ are gone from the world now?”

“Sure.” He looked at it. “It says three hundred and fifty.”

Buffy blinked, amazed, _God save me from philosophers_, then spun around with a hair stake ready – not fast enough for Angel, who’d grabbed Tobias by the neck. Tobias didn’t have time to shout or cry as Angel laughed, snapping his neck just as the Orb hit the ground and shattered. He threw the body at Buffy and she caught the corpse, but by the time it was in her arms, Angel was off and running into the dark.


	18. reckoning which way to go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Take You Away" by Ben Nichols.

Buffy wanted to surrender to the cliché and cry out_ I’m going after him,_ drop the body and tear off in hot pursuit and reach him before anyone else could cross his path. As soon as the thought was finished, she shoved it away to shout, “Everyone inside a house! A real house, _not_ that dorm! Suzanne, your house! Orozco, Suzanne, call the rest of the rangers, make sure they get inside, he hasn’t been invited,_ keep them inside!_ He can’t get off the island, that doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.”

It wasn’t a big island. Angel couldn’t get far. He couldn’t even get_ off_ it. There wasn’t anywhere he could be but here. Knowing where he was didn’t help if he wasn’t right here for her to find. It didn’t matter that she knew the island only a little better than Angel did.

“Gerhard, get everyone else into the hospital building. You guys aren’t in a position to fight him.” She drew back, affronted, and Buffy ground out, “Not tonight. Don’t argue.” Gerhard’s eyes went wide, then narrowed, and she nodded. “Good.”

Buffy handed Tobias’s corpse off to Lani, who took it gently, then turned to Robert. “You,” she hissed through her smile, a bare few inches from his face, “are the _smartest _idiots I’ve _ever_ met and I don’t have time to be angry with you but believe me, soon as I get Angel back, I _will_ be.”

“You want us to –” He started.

“No. You don’t do anything besides _get inside and safe_.” She put a hand flat on his back and pushed hard enough to get him moving, not so hard he’d fall over. He got the message. “Gerhard?” Buffy asked. “Spike?”

“On it,” Gerhard said, picking up what Buffy’d put down: shouting for the Berkeley nests to protect the humans and Suzanne’s house, the Fremont one to see to the hospital, directing them to necessary spots while the humans made their way up the hill and inside Suzanne’s house inside that protective vampire circle. She kept the front door open for Buffy to talk to Spike and Drusilla on the porch. The island was as much on lock-down as it could be, so they could spare a few minutes to come up with a plan that went beyond running out into the dark.

Buffy knew, from the last time they’d talked about this together, that Angel would want his soul back. However he got it, however someone else made it happen for him, if it ever got out – put it back. If something happened that meant it couldn’t go back – kill him permanently. Kill him and make sure there’d be no resurrection and no returning. Buffy could do it, _would_ do it, if she had to. She just wouldn’t let anyone else do it.

“I figure I’ll subdue him and drag him back to civilization, maybe break a leg of his while I’m at it,” she said with false gallows cheer.

Suzanne coughed. “Do you want –”

“No! No help from fools happy to line themselves up for slaughter.” Drusilla let out a bark, clicking her tongue and snapping her teeth. “Too easy for him to make a feast of you. Anyone can see that coming.”

“Did you see_ this_ coming?” Stella shouted. Drusilla just turned away.

“Okay. So we get him, we catch him.” Buffy kept talking to feel like she was doing_ something._ “Then we – we’ll…”

“Gotta get a bungee cord on that soul of his,” Spike said, voice low. “Duct-tape it in there. He’s managing less than a century at a time now. There a way to keep it in place?”

“Put it back in first. Is there –” The rest of Buffy’s question hung in the air as Drusilla laughed, quietly, and Spike just let out a soft hum. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” 

“Not to toot my own horn or anything, but we_ are_ pretty much the world’s experts on re-souling vampires,” Robert said, a_ please don’t hurt me _smile on his face. Much as Buffy wanted to, it wasn’t the time or the place. Not when he was right about that _one_ area of expertise. 

Best worst plans were never the first choice, but sometimes, they were all they had.

“You have the supplies to do it again?” Buffy asked, trying for polite and settling for terse. 

“They’re in the house.”

“Okay. We get the vampire, you get your stuff, you do the soul thing for just one vampire this time, we’re all good.”

“Not long-term,” Spike interrupted. “Like I asked, there any way to keep it in there? Double-curse him? Super-mojo things up?”

“Yeah. Hey, you’ve still got yours, right?” Robert asked. Spike nodded, glaring. “How come it didn’t go off with the rest?”

“You’re seriously asking about that _now?” _Buffy demanded, aghast at the utter balls of the question, as Spike’s glare went sharp. As if they didn’t have more pressing matters at hand.

“You got no right to ask that,” Spike hissed, hands clenching on the doorframe. “You little unlicked cub, you got _no bloody right_.”

“I’d like to know.” Robert stood his ground safe inside the house. “I’m not going anywhere. We did all the research we could on souled vampires, and yeah, your name came up. Except it never said what happened. Just that you got a soul one day without any information on how you did it. There’s been lots of speculation and theory, but…”

Buffy snorted out a bleak laugh. “This is why I keep telling you to sit down for a real interview. Just tell him and we’ll get on with this.”

“No,” Spike ground out, managing to keep his fangs away. “I’m not – it isn’t something I’ll share with strangers. I_ will_ say it’s not because of some curse. My soul’s mine. I _earned _it. It belongs to me._ That’s all you get._”

“It’s more than I knew yesterday, so I guess I can live with that.” Spike growled from just beyond the threshold. Robert set his mouth and crossed his arms.

“What did you mean, yes?” Suzanne asked Robert.

“It’s another back door. We did some work because what Millicent wanted –” Robert flinched at Drusilla’s hiss, then continued. “She thought if this worked, other vampires would want souls, too. A curse like this is only as strong as the vampire, so we thought, if they wanted it, if they agreed to it, we should work on improving it. So there’s it _still_ being a curse. There’s ways to break it, but if they agree to it, then they’ve got a solid claim to the soul and it can’t go flying out.”

“Not a bad plan,” Buffy allowed. “Okay, we get him, subdue him, bring him back and one of you guys puts the whammy soul curse on him again, yay, we’re home in time for breakfast.” She looked up at the night sky, knowing it wouldn’t be anything close to as simple as that. “So easy, a child could do it.”

“Oh, good bait for a trap, they are, what a fine idea, borrow one from the gardener and set her out neatly,” Drusilla trilled, then looked around at everyone’s faces. “No?”

“Not the time, love,” Spike gently chided. She merely shrugged, only slightly put out. Buffy had to admit she had made a good point.

“Look, the three of us are pretty much the only people qualified to deal with a soulless Angel,” Buffy told everyone. “More to the point, we’re the only ones he’ll be interested in fighting. Anyone else he’ll kill right away.”

Spike nodded, looking between her and Drusilla. “We go together – he’ll hear us all coming and know to hide. Decent way for a vamp to deal with the sun is by staying underwater, ’cept there’s too much that bugger could do by sun-up. Do better splitting up. Shouldn’t go too far, though, better odds if we’re together against him once it happens. Dru? What do you think, ducks, Ipswich?”

“Suits well, that does,” Drusilla murmured softly. “Change it for California.”

Spike smiled grimly, nodding in agreement. “Right, then.” He turned to Buffy. “You all right, love?”

She nodded. Drusilla hummed, then pulled Spike in close to leave a small kiss on his cheek. “Off you go.”

He stepped away, then looked back at Buffy for a long, heavy moment. She could see the regret and worry in his eyes, and stepped into his arms. “You be careful.”

“You too.” He kissed her, then pushed away, looking to both her and Drusilla. “Both of you.”

Then he was off, running into the darkness and disappearing in that silent way all vampires learned. Buffy took three minutes to double-check her weapons, triple-check Suzanne’s, and quadruple-check Robert’s promises, then walked with Drusilla out into the night.

Buffy stopped at the edge of the perimeter road, trying to decide the best direction to go. Dithering and wasting moments she didn’t have to waste. It wasn’t a waste for her to take a moment to say, “Not for nothing, but it’s good you thought to come.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Keeping the mess in Berkeley from getting worse. It’s really good you knew to come and help out there. And,” she clenched her teeth, “I know Spike’s been missing you and that you’re still important to each other.” Buffy turned away and started her patrol-beat walk, the easy way of moving her body to let it keep going all night. If she got close enough, she’d be able to feel where Angel was. It probably wouldn’t be a huge help, but – “Not like you couldn’t have seen this coming,” she muttered under her breath.

“You’ve no need to be so cruel.” Drusilla sniffed out her disapproval. 

“Sorry?” Damn vampire ears.

“Never could see far enough, clear enough, to see on past the horizon. Can’t tell, can’t see, could if I would. Wouldn’t have been caught, wouldn’t have been lost, if I could see as clearly as you think I can.” A shuddering sigh broke from Drusilla, and Buffy could feel the weight of the sadness dragging at her. “It’s all in whispers. It’s never far enough away to stop an arrival.”

She bared her teeth, then tisked at Buffy. “You’re seeking out what never could be. Never to go to the vicious places deep in the dark. Keep Angelus from pretty poppets, keep Spike from sad parties down beneath the waves, keep myself safe in Prague with its three buried kings. Kill all your grandmummies long before…” Her voice shook, then softened, not too far from tears. Buffy suddenly realized all the pain Drusilla lived inside, and for how long that’d been. “Float in the river as it rises. End this all before it started. No fuss.” She looked at Buffy a long moment. “One grave sin, and save myself all the centuries full of it.”

“You’d have _what?” _It took Buffy a moment to parse out what Drusilla was hinting at: that she hadn’t known this was coming, and if she had, she’d have stopped it before it began. Would’ve stopped Angel from killing the Kalderash princess. Would’ve kept Spike safe from long-ago tortures. Would’ve avoided the mob in Prague, would’ve – Buffy skipped over the threat about her grandmothers – would’ve killed herself long ago. Buffy’s heart ached to hear, to know, what Dru wished she’d done to herself. _You poor girl,_ she thought.

Then,_ Girl? She’s outlived empires._

“Maybe thrown myself off a cliff and let the ocean take care of me.” She tilted her head and smiled coldly. “Didn’t know how to swim until 1944. Spike insisted.”

“It’s a good skill to have,” Buffy agreed, for lack of anything fitting to say to Drusilla’s roundabout confession.

“Indeed. You go that way.” Without waiting for a response, Drusilla turned and headed off into the trees, leaving Buffy alone on the road.

Without any solid ideas of her own, she headed off in the direction Drusilla had pointed her towards, knowing one way or another, she’d meet up with Angel by the end of the night.


	19. it's the side effects that save us grace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Graceless" by The National.

Buffy stuck to the main road. The island didn’t have any street lamps or overhead light; everything came from the sky or the mainland. The illumination from San Francisco was almost enough to read a newspaper headline by. If she turned her back to the city and shielded her eyes, she could make out more constellations than she usually could back home. There weren’t any clouds and it didn’t feel like fog would be coming in, which made keeping San Francisco to her right the best idea for orienting herself. Stay right and keep circling. Angel was bound to turn up eventually. It was only a question of where and when, which meant it was best to stay on ready alert. Not high alert: that was a good way to wear herself out after ten minutes. Ready alert meant relaxed concentration, paying attention to everything around her as best she could manage. It was one of the more difficult lessons she’d had to learn.

She knew the island well enough by now to be able to easily pick out the sights in the dark. Over there was one tree with the branches gnarled up like a thin fist. That angle of the fence around the old missile base was the same as earlier. The Bay Bridge twinkled off on the edge of the peninsula, leading absolutely nowhere anyone wanted to go. Standing right at the trail juncture, she could about make out the sounds of wind blowing steadily in the trees. Close to the edge of her hearing, a coyote called out to the night. 

Wait – no. She’d read the nature guides along the trails, which said there weren’t any coyotes on Angel Island. If it was – 

Just at the edge of her hearing, something called back to the coyote. A bird of some kind, its call something much more fragile, sharp and high.

Buffy stopped to listen as hard as she could. There was the coyote again, longer this time; the bird practically singing back, its call shattering through the air. Then, nothing. The night went quiet again, the sort of quiet full of noise, heavy with waiting, even as blunted as her hearing was right now. She went back to walking and kept on waiting. The animal sounds didn’t come again. Maybe they’d said all they’d needed to each other. Maybe they’d shifted enough in pitch she’d only have been able to hear them if she was in the same room, not from wherever else they’d called out from. Or maybe Spike and Drusilla had said everything they needed, in those animal sounds.

She looked eastward over the bay towards Berkeley. Power to the city had been cut the second day of the catastrophe, after they’d finished evacuating all the hospitals. No reason to keep it going, no matter how steady or safe, with no one around to use it. That area would’ve been brightly lit, one small part of the grand Californian megalopolis, only now it was just as dark as the island around her. Except Berkeley was large enough that it was making a difference to the sky above it, a darkness that had nothing to do with the night. Buffy stopped walking to take in the view, keeping her ears eager as she raked her eyes over the dark, empty hills, barely making out the edges against the night sky. The ripped-up-ragged reality glow was still waving, and without any light for to reflect and refract, it was more of a _moving_ darkness, like waves coming from beneath the water. Having so much natural darkness shifted everything else around and made the night that much stronger. Between Angel Island behind her and Berkeley ahead, with San Francisco tucked behind the edge of the island, it was as dark a night as she’d seen in a long time. It made the sky bigger, which made the stars brighter, almost like they’d come in closer to Earth. Like they were farther down in the heavens than usual. The thought slid through her head, _The stars are down._ She stopped, electricity running up and down her spine.

The warning alarm sounded in her head, and Buffy spun on her heels just as Angel burst out and leaped across the tarmac at her. She kept her knife up, the comfort of a weapon, a dozen different holy symbols carved down both its sides. He laughed low and throaty as she kept up with him, trading jabs and punches to disable, to disarm. No weapons needed for him, just fists and fangs and feet. Angel lunged, she dodged; she slashed, he spun away. His deep laughter sounded in the cool night air as he dashed through her defenses to lightly tap her shoulder. She spun around – too slow – as his fingers slid up her opposite arm. Thrusting the knife where he should have been, Buffy realized her mistake the moment his hand wrapped around her wrist and made her drop the knife. He pulled her close, dropping a mockery of a kiss on her lips.

“Miss me, Buff?”

She brought her knee up to hit him between the legs. He let her go, bellowing with fury. She managed to think,_ Keep him moving, keep him busy,_ as she lunged and feinted. He jumped back and grabbed her arm, spinning her around, then pushing her away so she whirled like a deranged top. Buffy managed to stay upright, only barely – _Where the hell are you, Spike?_ – using her momentum to twist around him. She cursed low as he danced around her. Dark joy filled his laughter, almost its own beast. He threw his head back with delight, teasing her, leaving himself open, giving her clear shots. Catching her by the wrist, he pulled her close to his chest. “C’mon, sweetheart, am I moving too fast for you? Want me to slow down?”

The murmur shot into a yowl as Buffy plunged a second symbol-heavy knife into his torso, deep enough to hit a lung. She stumbled back, watching him as he pulled out the knife and licked it clean. He tossed it back at her. Not as an attack. Another taunt, this time with the age-old gesture of come-and-get-it, asking wordlessly that she pick it up and try again. To keep on play-fighting because_ he was playing._

Buffy kicked the knife away and he clapped, applauding her and cheering her on.

“This is hardly fair! Where’s your sidekick? He out screwing his old lady?”

She leapt at him, trying to catch him on his injury. Angel twisted, trapping her legs together, then rolled into her, dropping them both on the ground. She landed hard, the solid thump of her back hitting the asphalt of the old missile pad. He was still in human face and this close she could see the shiny glint of the hair gel he used to slick it all back. Her fist slammed up, landing directly on the bottom of his jaw, right where it’d hurt most. Thrusting him up and away, she scrabbled backwards over the dirt. His jaw was fractured, but he hadn’t lost that twisted smile. Jumping to his feet before she could steady herself on hers. Buffy settled her stance, feet wide apart, body poised. No knives and no stakes, just good old-fashioned hands and feet between them. She punched, he caught her hand; she brought her other hand up, he caught the wrist. He pulled her in close enough to kiss her mouth again, to press his lips against her throat.

She gave him a sweet and tender Glasgow kiss in return. Angel shouted in pain, letting her go to grab his face and cradle his nose. Buffy bared her teeth, shouting wordlessly at him, then roundhouse kicked him in the face. He staggered back, and she pulled out one of her metal hairsticks – as blessed as her knives – and moved to stake him, pin him down and keep him there.

He laughed. 

He fucking laughed and grabbed her by the wrists because she’d hurt him and he wasn’t playing anymore. Suddenly Buffy was down on the ground, ears ringing from the impact, and Angel leaned in close, his hands cold and solid around her wrists. He breathed deeply, taking in her scent, and this close she could see the shape of his eyes, the way his lips curled gently as he smiled. Still the beautiful face she remembered. Exactly who he’d used to be. It hurt to see him like this, the same as all those memories from so long ago. Buffy stared into his eyes, adrenaline drawing out the seconds, wondering if he felt it, too, time slipping away and pulling them along with it back into their past.

This was why Slayers weren’t supposed to get old. Every inch of her ached, her bones shouting, her muscles screaming. She tried to move and realized she couldn’t budge him, even wounded as he was. He’d straddled her, pinned her down, enjoying every second of her struggles, and if she’d been ten years younger maybe she could throw him off, except she wasn’t, she was herself at this age now. She was too old for this fight, too old for this battle. Just one vampire and the Slayer was – 

_– coyote and magpie splitting the night – _

Angel shouted as Spike barreled through the air, knocking him away from her. She fumbled upwards to see them together, nearly too fast for her to follow in the dim moonlight.

“Already beat you once, old man!” Spike roared, leaping towards him.

“For a goddamn _soda!”_ Angel brought his elbow down against Spike’s back.

They snarled and spun around each other, _fully_ dancing, all sharp deadly grace and joy. Move and counter, ebb and flow, two men who knew each other deep inside their marrow, all through their blood. Spike kicked Angel at the back of the knee, bringing him down; Angel threw out a punch that tossed Spike off his feet. He rolled and twirled about, running right back into the fray. Angel rose unsteadily, stood his ground, planting his feet and taking Spike as he came through. No more playing and no more dancing, only the fury and the fighting. Like prizefighters past their limits, holding each other up because neither one would ever willingly surrender to the other. Knees, elbows, sharp angles against soft sides. Not bothering to banter, and if they weren’t even baiting each other Buffy knew they were spending it all on the battle. 

Angel went flying and Spike strode towards him, bridging the distance. Angel got to his feet, wobbling, and ran to tackle Spike, bringing them both down. They rolled, wrestling, the upper hand shifting with each punch, her body aching in sympathy with every blow. Buffy couldn’t see which one of them landed the hit that separated them, allowing them a moment to recover. She couldn’t have kept up with them ten or even twenty years ago. Not since her fifties could she have moved like they were moving now. More shouting, more cries where all she could hear was the sounds, not their words. It’d been decades since she’d seen vampires fight like this, the weight of a battle carried in centuries. The world didn’t have this in it anymore. The three of them had seen to that and her heart soared in old Slayer joy to see it once again.

She couldn’t see who was winning, couldn’t tell who wanted it to end. Buffy_ knew_ what Angel was capable of, she _knew _Spike had killed Francine and Anna and Maria all on one horrible night so long ago, she knew the two of them better than anyone save each other and Drusilla, _where is she, where the fuck is Dru –_

A hoarse shout, a piercing cry, Spike spun sideways through the air, kicking out, catching Angel right where Buffy had hurt him, then Angel was off his feet and on the ground, Spike straddling his chest and _punching_, down and down and down, finally grabbing Buffy’s knife from the ground and thrusting it into Angel’s chest to hit the heart, gurgling out blood and air. Angel was down and staying there.

Spike rolled off, back to his knees, hands empty, arms at his sides. He wasn’t even breathing. His head dropped down and a shudder flowed through him. Buffy didn’t step in closer. She watched him sit up enough to easily flip Angel’s limp body over onto his stomach. Spike rumbled something low as he grabbed Angel’s hair, holding his head up as Drusilla strode over, out of the darkness and into the battlefield now that it was done. Angel managed a punch-drunk snarl through his fangs and she just smiled back at him. She knelt beside the two of them, gently running a hand over Angel’s human-faced cheek, looking deeply into his eyes.

Buffy moved in closer. Angel snarled out something and Spike jerked Angel’s head back. Drusilla leaned in closer, almost swaying in time with her words. Buffy saw it come over Angel: a shiver, a tremor, the full-body shift of being taken over. He didn’t go limp, exactly. He went empty in a way that vampires didn’t usually go. Angel’s body was there, like one of the catatonics leaned up against a wall. The body was there, and the mind was gone. It freaked her out the first time she’d seen one and nothing had changed. It wasn’t a good look for him. Or for anyone.

Drusilla rose gracefully to her feet. “There we have it, then.” Spike shoved Angel’s head away hard enough for it to smack into the ground. He didn’t react, just lying where he landed. Nothing more than a lump of dead flesh. “Let’s get him back, love.”

She nodded, then looked at Buffy. “He’ll not be beneath or within me long. He’s always been strong, our Angel. I’ll stay nearby, to keep it fresh on him, so we’d best get him finished shortly.”

“Good,” Buffy breathed in relief.

“All right.” Drusilla glanced back at Angel. “Should I make him quack as a duck?”

“That’s fine,” Buffy said quickly.

“It’ll be easy,” she pushed, as Spike hauled Angel to his feet. “You’re certain? No sheep? A chicken? It’d be a grand laugh.”

“Let’s just get him re-souled.”

“Suits me,” Spike grunted, hauling Angel along, who followed mutely. Slowly, too. Buffy couldn’t make herself take the second knife, even after Drusilla pulled it out of Angel’s chest and offered it to her. Spike took it, licked it clean, and stuck it in his jeans. It was his knife now, as far as Buffy was concerned.

Every few minutes, Drusilla checked that Angel was still in her thrall. A couple of times, she did the staring thing to make sure of it, but it was an otherwise uneventful walk back to the garrison. Angel went where he was put, shoved down onto his knees on the ground outside the dorm cabin. None of the conspirators could decide which vampire to look at or what to say to Buffy, so they settled on focusing on their notebooks and bundles of herbs, figuring out who’d be the one to do the deed and drawing the chalk circle around Angel as he knelt there, silent and empty. Buffy personally couldn’t wait for a shower, and Angel and Spike were each the definition of having to see the other guy. Drusilla just stood poised, calm, and peaceful. Ready and waiting, even.

“So now we’ve got it set up,” Robert began, trying to focus on the cursework and mostly managing it, “there’s mostly our stuff, but there’s a point where – you’ve still got him, right?”

“Yes, I do,” Drusilla told him.

“Great. Keep him that way. When we ask him if he’s ready, if he accepts, have him say yes.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s not him saying it as himself?” Buffy asked.

“Not the way we’ve got it set up, no. It just needs to be him saying it.”

Which meant there was a way to mass-hypnotize vampires, or coerce them through torture and torment, force them to say yes – her stomach didn’t flip, though it curled up tight around itself.

Buffy watched the would-be crusaders go through the ritual. She knew it well enough by now she could focus less on what they were doing and more on how they were doing it. Was able to watch how Spike stood watching Angel, head cocked to the side, rubbing a bloody hand over his head and making his curls part like a wave at the beach. Drusilla waited patiently by his side, at the ready. All the people who’d arranged the bones just so, who lent their voices to the chant, making it that much stronger together and trying to narrow down onto the magic and not why they were doing it. The wariness and weariness suffusing all their movements and each syllable as it passed through their lips.

When it was time for the audience participation section of the evening, about two-thirds of the way through it, Robert asked Angel if he willingly accepted what would be placed upon him. Drusilla swayed on her feet, and Angel mindlessly stated, “Yes.”

When the Orb was gone and Angel was fully himself again, he looked around at everyone present. He worked his mouth, and words weren’t coming.

“Only lost it a few hours this time,” Spike remarked, breaking the tension. “Just one murder, too. You’re getting better at this.”

“Which…”

“Ratboy. You know, the bleeding-heart animal lover.”

“Tobias,” Claire shot out.

“Oh,” Angel murmured, staring at the ground.

“You need us for anything else?” Spike asked Robert.

“No, you’re – you’re all good here,” he said quickly. “We’ll get in touch with all the clean-up crews tomorrow, get it arranged so nobody’s stuck here too much longer.”

“The fairgrounds after the show’s come and gone,” Drusilla nearly sang.

“Get ready to face the music,” Spike told them. “And get drummed off the stage, hopefully.”

Angel slowly got to his feet. Buffy gave him a hand up, and he rested his weight on the knee Spike hadn’t kicked in. He didn’t apologize or ask for anything, though he squeezed her hand as gently as he could. Still large and careful, more than capable of enveloping her own. She’d always liked that about his hands. They had callouses, now. That had changed from what she’d remembered. Artist’s callouses from pencils and paintbrushes.

“We’ve still got some blood left over, right?” Angel asked.

“A few pouches, yeah. Dru said to – oh, darling,” Spike smiled at Drusilla. She fluttered her eyelashes and looked away, humming happily.

Buffy could feel the adrenaline slowly working out of her system. She let go of Angel’s hand and looked back at Spike. “Are we at bedtime yet?”

“Nearly there, I think,” Spike told her with false, forced cheer. 

By then, the rangers had spread the news that people could come out of the lockdown now that things were safe again and Angel had his soul back once more. Bully for them. Even if it was bedtime for her, for everyone, Buffy wasn’t heading off to the guest bedroom just yet. She headed on up the hill, leading the way through the little shortcut just to the west of Suzanne’s house to cut through the trees and get everyone to the hospital that much quicker.

Gerhard was waiting for them, the only one out on the porch.

“Hey, there,” she called out. She was standing by the door, casual in her posture, fresh bandages on her arm. “I was afraid we’d be called in for emergency firefighting duty.”

“Nah, arson was never Angelus’s deal,” Spike teased. “Always more my thing.”

“Yeah, I remember reading that once,” she said, nodding. “Is it all over now? You’ve got it back safe?”

“Thanks to me,” Dru preened. “Everything told me I’d be important here.”

“You did,” Angel said quietly. “So is it all right if I…”

“Sure, come on in,” Gerhard told him. “We’re not judging here. Well, we are, but we’re giving you a pass because you only killed Tobias. He was a shithead.”

“There’s also that after averting your first couple apocalypses, you’re allowed a shithead or two in moments of soul-losing,” Spike pointed out. Angel had the dignity to look slightly embarrassed. Spike clapped him on the shoulder. “Cheer up, grandad. Thanks to Dru, there’s no easy way to get it lost now. Not so bad, really, trading a shithead for that certainty.”

“Get inside,” Gerhard let out a small laugh. “Get some blood in you and get some rest. All of you.”

Dru followed Spike and Angel through the door. Buffy hesitated, considered it, but stayed outside. So did Gerhard. She sat down on the edge of the porch, her legs dangling off the side, and gestured with an open hand for Buffy to join her.

“How are you managing?” she asked, when Buffy was sitting down.

She was too tired to be anything but honest. “As best I can.”

“That’s all we can do,” Gerhard told her. 

Buffy nodded, feeling an ache start to set in around her lower back, and stretched her hands over her head to work out a little bit of the kink. She’d be a tapestry of bruises in the morning, probably even through to the day after that. By then, though, she might be home. Home with her own towels and fresh jeans and the right kind of milk in the fridge and the trees in the backyard and Sebastopol’s sidewalks and Spike in bed with her again. She could manage being a tapestry of bruises and aches at home. She didn’t want to put a timetable on anything yet, but the hope of just another day and change – “And yourself?”

“Like you said, as best I can,” Gerhard answered. She looked down at the ground below them, swinging her legs. “How do you handle it?” Buffy looked at her. She was still staring down. “How everyone looks at you and follows you and_ listens_ to you. Just because you were there. Just because the thing that happened to you happened, it doesn’t give you anything to go on. But everyone else expects you to have something. I know you’ve had people looking to you way longer than I have. I know it’s not exactly the same thing, you and me.” She shook her head. “I guess I want to hear if it gets easier.”

“In some ways,” Buffy answered carefully. “You get experience with being the one who makes the decisions, and you learn to figure out what loses you the least sleep.”

“Taking responsibility for the things you don’t want anyone else to have to think about.”

“That too.”

“I would’ve kept it.” Buffy snapped her head around to look at Gerhard. She wasn’t swinging her legs anymore. She’d gone not-moving and hunchy, her shoulders down and her back bent, slowly, carefully, turning her head to look at Buffy, her face open and her voice hushed. “I wouldn’t have ever asked for it and I’m glad it’s gone and I would’ve kept it if I could. I was getting used to it and it wasn’t hurting so much anymore. I’d been able to imagine a time when it wouldn’t have hurt. I never thought that it’d be nice or fun, but it’d been comforting to know. Really _know._ I can remember everything I ever did, I accept it and acknowledge it, and I understand it all. It’s that when I had my soul, I _knew._ And now I don’t know anymore. It’s like how you can step on air when you’re dreaming. And you wake up and it’s gone.”

She looked away from Buffy. “I _remember_ knowing. I can’t do that now. And I can’t ask for it back. I _can’t_. If I do, they’ll have won. I knew I had to be the first one to give it up because everyone would follow my lead and give theirs up too. If some of us kept them – if _one_ of us kept theirs, they’d have won over us. I couldn’t accept that. I couldn’t imagine a time I’d ever accept that. Even if it was my decision to keep it, it hadn’t been my decision to have it. They didn’t leave me with a real choice. Giving it up was all I could do. I didn’t want to. But I knew I had to.”

“Yeah,” Buffy admitted. “Sometimes it’s like that.”

Gerhard nodded and went back to swinging her legs. “Solidarity for all or for none.”

Something in the way Gerhard intoned it gave Buffy pause. “Hey, where are you from?” she asked. Gerhard looked at her, mouth twitching in something close to a smile. “I mean, back when you were a human. Where did you come from to start? If you don’t mind my asking.” Some vampires did.

“I don’t. I’m from Germany,” Gerhard replied. Buffy nodded. She gave her an honest smile. “Well, East Germany, really.”

“Oh,” Buffy said. “Wait. Do you mean eastern Germany, the parts next to Poland, or do you mean…?”

Gerhard popped her lips and tossed Buffy a bandaged fingergun. “I was born before it was founded, although not by enough to mean much. I know it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s still always going to be where I’ll be from.”

“I know a little about what that can be like. The place you’re from not existing anymore.”

That got a laugh out of her, a real, honest, it’s-only-funny-because-it’s-us laugh, and Buffy let out a little one to join in.

“When did you leave?”

“A long time ago. Back when it was still around.” She sighed. “My plan was to get myself smuggled out. Me and four other women. We’d all made our own arrangements, so I didn’t know any of them beforehand, and of course I didn’t know the fixer, either. Just someone who put me in touch with someone who…He was the first vampire I ever met. He got us to the docks, and he told us, one of us would have to go to him and he’d take the rest across the sea to Denmark like he’d promised. I was the oldest, so I put myself forward so they wouldn’t have to try to decide.”

Of course you did, Buffy thought. “Where you scared?” she asked.

“God, I was fucking terrified!” she barked out a laugh. “I was so afraid of what was going to happen – to me, to them. I didn’t know vampires were real and the first one I meet says he’ll be nice and only eat _one _of us. I looked at the other girls there, and I saw how much younger they were than I was, and I thought, _they shouldn’t have to make that decision.”_ She shrugged. “I think he turned me instead of just eating me because I stepped forward right away and didn’t give him any squirming.”

Buffy nodded. _How kind of him._

Gerhard went on, “I managed to get myself out not that much later. Made my way to America, because why not go all the way across the world if you’re already dead, kept going West until I ran out of continent, and didn’t look back. I wouldn’t say I miss the DDR. I’d say there’s things_ about_ it I miss, but as for the whole of it, I don’t miss my life there. Frankly, I don’t miss my _life_, period.”

“I take it your getting out is where most of your early bodies come from.”

“I will neither confirm nor deny…” They laughed again, more easily this time.

“Would you have stayed? If someone told you, wait eighteen years and the Wall’s going to come down, would you have stuck around?”

“No. The person I was couldn’t have waited that long. She’d have wanted to get out as soon as she could because she’d seen banal human evil in a thousand different ways since she could remember and wanted to know freedom. The person I am now might, because I know I’m not going to be dying anytime soon and eighteen years isn’t all that long. Sometimes I think about the work I did to leave, and how happy I was just before…how happy I was to know I’m going someplace_ free._ Someplace I’d finally get to decide my life for myself.” She looked up at the sky in between the trees. “Unlife, now. Semantics.” 

“And it’s all your own. Whatever you want to call it.”

“Yeah,” she nodded. “The land of the free.”

“You’ve done a good job of making it the home of the brave.”

“Why, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” The seconds slid on quietly, turning into minutes of gentle company. Gerhard noticed first, tilting her head and sniffing gently. Buffy took a few more moments to see Suzanne walking up the path, stopping a respectful distance from the hospital.

“Hey,” Buffy said. Gerhard smiled, and Suzanne came close to smiling back.

“I was – I’m glad to see you’re still awake,” she started, speaking at a loud, steady I’m-imagining-you’re-my-Grandma pitch.

“Why shouldn’t she be? It’s only a quarter past eleven,” Gerhard asked, confused.

“Yes, I know. I wanted to ask someone something that involves you, so if you’d been home by now, I couldn’t have managed it.” She straightened her shoulders and back. “I assume you won’t mind if I invite Spike, but I wanted to –”

“What’s this?” Spike stuck his head out through the door. “Sorry, was just passing by and heard my name, what’s this now?”

“If it’s all right with both you and Buffy, then I’ll offer you an invitation. But not if it isn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Buffy asked. Suzanne’s face tumbled around as she tried to find the words to say _vampires make me uncomfortable _without offending the Slayer who lived with one. Buffy cut in, “Yes, it’s fine. Spike? You down for a night in a house?”

He took a moment to theatrically consider it, and Buffy hid her smile behind a hand when he began talking in his old Victorian cadence, all the better to win over the fairer sex. “Well, given how everyone’s pretty much as stable as can be, what with everything’s which happened to them tonight, and seeing as how we’ll all be out of here in a night or two, depending, and as it’s not that far to run, really – I’d say…yes if you also invite Dru.”

“I’m sorry?” Suzanne asked. “Why would I invite –”

“Because she’s earned a night in a house,” Buffy pointed out. “We’ll both be there, if you’re worried. But she’s done an awful lot of good lately, and you’ve got the couch downstairs.”

“Yes. I didn’t think that…” She looked from Spike to Buffy to Gerhard to Spike to Buffy to Drusilla, now standing next to him in the doorway.

“Plus there’s her luggage in the house already,” Buffy said.

“A forced invitation never settles kindly,” Dru told her. “If this one’s offered freely, I’ll welcome it without fuss.”

“All right, then,” Suzanne allowed, bending under all their expectations. Her voice didn’t shake as she said, “Spike, Drusilla, I invite you both into my home.” Buffy looked to Spike and Dru, who hopped down off the porch. Dru kept walking, and Spike offered Buffy a hand in getting down.

“Good night,” Gerhard called out.

As they walked down the road, Buffy finally asked Spike, “Ipswich?”

“1922,” he answered.

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s leave it there.”

_At least it wasn’t Suwałki, 2009._ The official League report for the night of May 28, 2009 was thin on the details, and Buffy was more than fine with that. She took Spike’s hand instead of dwelling on the past and held onto the happiness of feeling his fingers sliding between her own.

Once inside Suzanne’s house, Drusilla breezed into the shower without even asking where it was or if anyone else wanted it first. Nobody could bring themselves to be so much as irked about it. She took her time under the water, and when she was done, all dressed up nice, Spike stepped in after, clean clothes held tight against his chest.

“Hey,” Buffy called out, beckoning Drusilla into the bedroom. She followed the invitation, and Buffy closed the door behind her.

“Yes?”

“Look, there’s – it’s that with Spike in the shower and the water going, he won’t really be able to hear me say this, so this is about the only chance – you did good tonight. Real good. Not just your job, but like you said back in Berkeley. You_ did_ good.”

“Kind of you to say.”

“Yeah, well, I mean it.” Dru cocked her head to the side. “What I want to say isn’t just that you’re doing good, which is good, it’s great you’re doing good to the world. It’s that – okay, I’ll just get to it. I’m getting up there in years. You can tell.” Dru nodded. “I don’t like it, and it’s just what happens to us humans when we live long enough. We get old. I don’t know how old I’ll end up being, I’d like it if it’s not for a while, and it’s going to come when it comes. And I’m thinking, you’re here now. You’ve got your feet under you more than you ever did back when we first met.”

“Many thanks.”

“You’re welcome. And I’m thinking, with you here, and with me being me, I’m just thinking, Spike’s going to stay around.” Buffy’s hands came up, grabbing at the air. The words kept falling out of her mouth as fast as she could think them, babbling like a doddering old great-aunt who couldn’t stop repeating herself or figure out what she wanted to say until she’d said it. She ploughed on, “He’s going to be here longer than I will. It’s just how it works, I’m not mad about it. I’m trying to say, Drusilla’s here all the way from the former Soviet Union, Berkeley right now’s not all _that_ different from what Chernobyl’s like most days.”

“Pripyat.”

“There, too. They need vampires to help clean up. You’ve got what they need.” She stilled her hands. “And I’m thinking, you and Spike always make each other happy.” Dru nodded. Buffy took a deep breath, tried to keep her voice from shaking, and failed. “And with what’s going to happen, you two being happy together, maybe where I’m going I won’t know about it. I don’t know. But I’ll be happy now thinking of you two when I’m gone.”

“Thought of this for ages, have you?”

“Some,” Buffy admitted. Ever since Dru took her helmet off in her hotel room. It just hadn’t been a good thing to consider until tonight.

Dru nodded again. “It’s a nice thought.” She smoothed out her red dress. A really beautiful red dress. “Spike…” She shook her head, pressed her hands to her chest, and shivered, looking _into_ Buffy the way she’d looked into her in Berkeley a few days earlier, ages ago. She spoke carefully, her voice forced steady with every ounce of effort she had. “He’s never stopped his love for me. Much as he’s to love you all his years, he won’t ever cease. It’s a gift of his. He’s not loved either of us quite the same. He holds so many variations. The love he and I share, we still have it, the most we can. We raised each other, you know. We raised each other in a brutal kind of love. And it seems to me he’s all grown up.” Dru placed her hand on Buffy’s cheek gently, kindly, lovingly. She didn’t smile, but there was some happiness around her face. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Suzanne took the next shower, Buffy the last one, climbing into a bed with Spike already in it for the first time in way too long. She laid against him, enjoying the sensation of his chest against her back, his arms around her. His hands, still warm from the shower, sliding across her side and her hip and, oh yes, _oh God oh yes,_ sliding their way _down._

“Oh, Slayer,” he whispered right in her ear, breathing heavy to draw in as much of her smell as he could. “Have you missed this?”

“Yes,” Buffy groaned, flipping over. Spike slid down under the covers, and she stroked those beautiful, soft brown curls as they settled between her legs. “Yes.”

“Grab a pillow, love,” he purred, fingers on her waist and pulling at her pajamas.

She made do with his rumpled sleepshirt, working it between her teeth to keep from waking Suzanne and bothering Dru. Spike took his time to pull a gentle climax from her, letting her enjoy the build and rise, letting her ride the crest of the wave and letting the wave build until it was her entire body that came. He stayed between her legs until she was far past done and well into complete, and he kissed her as he tenderly slid inside, every movement drawing it out for them both until they’d each finished. Then he took his sleepshirt from the floor because being a guest at someone else’s house meant sleeping nude wasn’t ever on the table.

And finally, his body cool and solid and_ there_ against her own, she slept with Spike.


	20. hanging just beyond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "The Beautiful Sea" by Hem.

Sunlight breathed through the village, suffusing it with grace. Playing with her senses, carried by memories, floating through all she could see. The right-side forward letters lay gentle on the signs in front of her. Names she couldn’t read but could fathom the meaning, now. Fathom the meaning and feel the ache for every lost city. Better than before, yet still indistinct, still unknown, only the meaning and not the monument. Not better than what the foxes sang or what the ghosts whispered. The village was empty, only shells of buildings and great meeting halls made for the happiness of all mankind, now left for the earth and sky, the animals and ghosts. Left for those who haunted, who moved in between shadow and light. This was home, now. Where her nights ended, where the dawn never came and ghosts never left. She walked with a creature at her side under the sky of the lost city, a place she’d never known and would never see again.

“Have we done this before?” She asked. “Sharing like this?”

“Once on our birthday,” replied the creature. “And a few times since.”

“You aren’t staying much longer.” It wasn’t a question.

“No,” the creature whispered sadly. “Not for me anymore.”

Buffy didn’t have a moment between dreaming and waking; Slayer dreams were always a sudden, sharp transition. “Spike,” she croaked, voice heavy from sleep. He was awake in an instant. She got up and he followed her, not asking questions. They’d been together long enough he didn’t need an explanation. She’d had a Slayer dream and that was enough to get her up, out of bed, not even bothering with getting dressed or putting on shoes but heading right where she knew she had to go. Right out to the porch where Dru was sitting and waiting.

“Good morning.” It was, technically: not that much longer until sunrise. She didn’t turn and look at them. “Glad for you to join me.”

“You been out here all night?” Spike stepped towards her. “Come on, pet, let’s get you inside, get some sleep. It’s almost day.”

“Nearly there, yes.” She stayed sitting.

“What’s wrong, love?”

“I thought it would be more,” she said. “I can feel all it’s done and it’s not to be disregarded. I still thought it would be more to bear, much more, and it’s so little put up beside its pageants. It’s hardly worth seeing it challenged. I can see what’s lurking below the horizon and there’s no need to find my way through trouble any longer.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Spike said quickly, as Dru’s words slowly rolled through Buffy’s head. “Dru, there’s no need for that. We’re here for you, both of us. Aren’t we, Buffy? Go on, tell Dru you’re here for her. Tell her.”

“It’s all right, Dru.” Buffy stepped closer. Last night’s dream clattered across her mind, every letter and blade of grass still clear, and the full sorrow of the whispering heavy in her throat. “Come on inside.”

“No. You see,” Dru’s voice trembled happily and she didn’t look at Buffy, “I’ve not made friends with it. Not as you have, dear heart. I could never be its friend. I’ve never understood it as you’ve managed for so long. I’ve simply found my way to walk in peace with it.” She shivered. “At long last.”

“Dru, you’re not –” Spike began. Dru was on her feet, a finger on his lips.

“Shh.” She put the finger to her own lips. “Shh.” She shook her head. “Please, don’t ask that of me. Ask and I would answer and I daren’t let you bear that burden. Too much for you, already carrying such a heavy spark, to ask you to shoulder a finality. The waiting’s done. Allow me this and this alone. Please don’t deny me this last choice.”

He looked at her, eyes raking over her face, desperation clear across his still-healing features that slowly, in the wake of Drusilla’s calm certainty, resolved itself into finally understanding the finality of the moment. He swallowed. He shook his head. “Then I won’t.”

“Thank you.”

“Can I get the why of it? Can you at least give me that?”

“There’s nothing else left to me,” she said, just as sad as she’d been in their shared dream. “Nowhere left for me to dance, naught remaining in the world.” She placed a hand on Spike’s chest. “I see you, all entire. I see you moving forward, and never looking back. I see Angel, bound up safe. I see you more.” Her hands lay on his shoulders, and her voice trembled even as her eyes stayed locked steady to Spike’s. Buffy might not as well have been there. She knew there wasn’t anywhere else on Earth she could be. 

“I always see you, past what remains of me. Past all the nights of our life, and I see them gone. What came before will never come around again, and it’s folly to run after the painted horses going round and round. Whatever songs you’ll be singing in the world to come, I can’t sing them. There’s no other way forward. It took me so long to see that, in seeing you. In one last…” She smiled, faintly. She took one of his hands in her own, placed it on her chest. He flexed his fingers, and splayed them out, to feel as much of her body as he could. To anchor himself to her and keep her here a moment longer, and a moment past that.

“It’s to stay or to go. To stay is nothing at all, not for the likes of us. It’s in the going that I can find my way at last. It’s been too long since I was last able to see myself in such a place.” She stroked over his face, his head, his neck, laced her fingers between his and lay their hands against her chest as she gathered herself. “I know you want something else of me now. This isn’t for you. Much as we both want that, this is all that’s left for me. To see through to an ending. I wish I could do otherwise. If I could, then…”

“Dru,” he managed, his voice trembling, Buffy’s own heart shaking.

“For the sake of all the burning baby fish,” she whispered, and a cracked laugh crashed out of his mouth. Buffy raised her hand, then caught herself, pulling back and hating every second she couldn’t comfort him. Spike kept laughing, and Dru kept smiling that knowing, sad smile, stroking his cheeks until the last breath of his laughter.

He opened his eyes. Wide, clear eyes filled with all the love he’d ever felt for her. “Goodbye, Drusilla,” he whispered.

“Let me be free,” she said, her voice breaking. He nodded, mute. She looked at Buffy, somehow more present than she’d ever been. “Take care of him.” She looked at Spike, her hands on his face. “My Spike. My William.” She kissed him – kissed him as sire, mother, wife, lover, sister, teacher, inspiration, caregiver, companion, friend, everything she had ever been to him. “You were the best choice I ever made.”

She let him go, and began walking away into the looming dawn. Buffy ran after her, not sure what else to do – no idea how to process what she could see coming, no thoughts on how to avert something she knew she couldn’t touch. Dru carried herself with pride and harrowing grace. She sped after Dru, down the hill, gathering speed and rushing past her. Spike was still on the porch, and Buffy had to stop and turn around and watch just as the sun rose.

Most vampires disappeared in a blaze of fire, leaving only ash. Most vampires screamed, the sounds roaring out into the sunlight. Most vampires weren’t Drusilla.

She held her arms out, her eyes wide open to receive the sunshine as it enveloped her, suffused her body, from her hands up to her face. Buffy saw her gasp in surprise, heard her unexpected joy, and watched as the flames began. They weren’t like anything she’d ever seen on a vampire before. Drusilla didn’t dust from the inside out, or even the outside in.

The flames skittered over her, up her arms, through her hair, along her cheeks, and she still smiled. Drusilla didn’t turn into a pillar of fire. She didn’t disappear into ash. She stood and burned and smiled while Buffy and Spike could only watch. It was too much for them to even cry out. They couldn’t be so cruel as to cry their own pain as she reached a place of such peace. All they could do was watch as the flames shifted, wrapping themselves all around her, and as the sunshine brought the day, it took Drusilla from the world. The light touched the part of her that had always been beyond the ordinary world and pulled the rest of her away. There wasn’t ash. There wasn’t dust. There was only fire. Red flames, then blue, and finally no color at all, only pure burning. Spike watched from the porch, on his knees, and Buffy watched from her side, on her feet. They watched Drusilla smile as she made the only choice that was left to her.

And she was gone.


	21. make her want to stay in my arms she'd rest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Gun Song" by The Lumineers.

Spike held it together pretty well that last day on Angel Island, staying inside and snapping at everyone who so much as deigned to breathe in his presence as the final clean-up arrangements were made. As soon as it got dark he fled Suzanne’s house and headed right for Angel – and they’d both come out of the hospital looking a little rumpled, their wounds a little fresh, which Buffy wasn’t asking about – and helped get the vampires onto the ferry and to the mainland. 

Nobody had asked about Drusilla. Buffy and Spike didn’t say anything. Buffy had checked the spot where Drusilla had gone, and there hadn’t even been any singed grass. She’d completely left the world without leaving any mark. Other vampires could be swept up afterwards, or have their bones ground up. Drusilla had gone without leaving anything behind. Maybe she’d have liked that.

Once they got to Berkeley, Spike went to pick up the car where he’d parked it, and sooner than anyone else remotely involved with the disaster, the two of them were heading home. Two silent hours later, they found it was pretty much exactly as they’d left it. The gardens and solarium a bit scruffier from the days without Spike’s attention, the house itself a little stuffy from Izzy being the only person to have gone inside for the last week, but still recognizably what they’d left. It always threw Buffy how the unimaginable could happen right_ here_ and meanwhile, over _there_ was just the same as ever.

They’d thrown their dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, put the weapons away, taken showers, all the usual tasks. Except this time, Buffy hadn’t slipped right under the covers and gone to sleep. Spike had wanted to know if she was feeling it tonight; she let him know, without saying much, she was very much feeling it.

Spike had kissed her back, carried her to the bedroom, undressed her, grabbed the lube from the bathroom and prepared her gently. He’d taken his time down below, making sure everything was slick and ready and that Buffy was already enjoying herself before he ever slid inside her. He’d been unhurried at first, firm and strong, solid flesh all the way through. It hadn’t taken much before it was firm and strong and_ hard_, and now it was hard and fast, heavy thrusts she liked more for the weight of his body on hers than for the feelings of him inside her.

She stroked over his back and arms and let him get on with the pounding. Spike’s head was in the crook of her neck and he’d begun slamming into her, unconcerned whether she was enjoying herself. Buffy would have liked to kiss him, and rolled her head to the other side of the pillow so she wasn’t as near to his face.

He was getting close: his thrusts were more deliberate and slower, more individual force to each one. He snapped his hips and stayed pressed deep as he finished, a little growl and a tiny matchbook roar signaling his completion. She kept stroking his back and arms, making small comfort noises for his benefit. He pulled out and rolled away, and Buffy lay there for a minute before pushing herself up onto her elbows.

“Are you doing all right?” she asked, just to speak aloud.

He didn’t answer. He just lay there, not even bothering to take in any air to answer. Cold and still, without any trembling.

“Because I’m over here thinking, you haven’t fucked me like that since I was sixty,” she threw out, hoping to get something. “I’m not complaining or anything, I’m just saying, that doesn’t have to be a once-every-few-decades thing.”

He gave a single full-body ripple, like he was stretching his muscles to fit his skin. Buffy reached out and laid her hand on his shoulder. Spike didn’t turn towards her or away from the touch. She kept her hand on his shoulder as he spoke: “I don’t know it yet.” 

Buffy kept silent. His voice was low, deep and raw. “I know she’s not here. I_ know_ she’s gone, I saw it_ happen_, I saw her_ go_, and I don’t – I can’t get it inside my head she’s not around anymore. I can’t fit it together. Like she’s just – just back to hiding in the empty fields. I _can’t_…” Spike turned over, and Buffy’s heart broke when she saw his face.

The thing with vampires and feelings was that they didn’t get them the same way humans did. If they got angry, their throats didn’t squeeze closed and their ears didn’t ring. If they got disgusted, their stomachs didn’t churn. If they got scared, their hearts didn’t start pounding. They didn’t have a lot of the assumed automatic secondary effects of their emotions, because their bodies weren’t alive. Vampires pretty much just felt their feelings. There were still a few things that made their way out: clenched jaws, restless hands. Tones of voice. Smiles and laughter. And tears.

Spike was crying, his eyes pouring out tears, as the rest of his face stayed still and cold. Nothing but tears to show the depth of his sorrow and loss. Sliding down his sharp, battle-cracked cheeks, pooling on the pillow, and his face held such grief Buffy’s heart howled for the pain she knew he felt. “Don’t know what to do.” He blinked, tears still falling. “She’s _gone_, and…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Never had to wonder before. Whenever it was someone else, there’d be the ceremony, the rituals. We’d all mourn an’ there wouldn’t be a reason to be sorry. Dru’s gone and it’s up to me to have something for her.” He looked into Buffy’s eyes, through the tears that kept falling, bewildered and lost. “No idea how to figure the way it should go an’ no idea how to start. She’s gone…she’s bloody well gone and I…she’s_ gone_, Buffy.” His jaw clenched and he looked away, staring off towards a horizon only he could see. “There’s nothing…just nothing.”

Buffy moved closer, reached out. He filled her arms, curling up in her embrace.

“Never had to mourn each other.” His voice was laced with bitter wonder. “None of us. Angel didn’t even mourn Darla after she did herself in. There’s nothin’ to do because none of it_ fits_ for…the rest is for humans. Showin’ the world they lost someone. Vamps are already past that. We’ve had the ceremonies. Never needed them for each other. All I got waiting is – I’ll never see her again. Never. She’s gone, and…” His voice trailed off, leaving only silence. Leaving nothing.

Buffy held him tightly. “I’m still waiting for my mother.”

“God,” he whispered.

“It gets easier. That’s all I can say.”

“But what do I do?”

“You keep on loving her like she isn’t gone.”

Spike was motionless, no breath in his body, no shivering, no whimpering, no sobbing or wailing. Just the loss in his eyes and the endless flow of tears down his face. Buffy kept on holding him. She didn’t whisper or murmur or stroke him anywhere; just held him, giving him the time he needed. Vampires had all the time in the world, and sometimes that was how long it took to fully understand that you’d never make a new memory of someone you loved.

It came to her, sliding through her head,_ Everything he’s feeling is from before he had a soul._

_How could she ever say they’re not people? Not human, yeah, but – not people?_

Buffy buried her nose in his hair and took in a deep sniff, his curls soft against her face, the smell of shampoo rich and warm and the smell of Spike faint and gentle.

There wasn’t much slaying left to her, now, but she was still the Slayer. Being the Slayer was more than just ridding the world of vampires and demons and the forces of darkness. Being the Slayer meant they were her responsibility. All of them. In every way that mattered.

She held him, and let him cry until he was done, and kept on holding him.


	22. rise without anyone to raise you

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from a translation of "The Village Awaits the New Moon" by Värttinä.

Working the dirt kept his mind empty. Feeling his body, just his body, labor and toil, kept the lurking grief from surging upwards and dragging him deep below the waves. Good to see something tangible come from his hands, too. Something honest. Something pure, even.

Ten minutes after sunset, Spike was out in the garden, driving the spade into the soil. If he wanted a freestanding trellis, he’d have to anchor it in deep. This was the best spot in the gardens for it – off in the northwestern corner, an area he’d mostly left alone. He could work it through, see about working with the existing plants to the biggest benefit. Most of the scent-garden was off to the southern end of the property, closer to the house. There wasn’t reason not to put in little islands of scents around. An aroma archipelago.

Maybe not that, not quite. The idea of stumbling into scents, it was possible he had something there. Wet pools, maybe. Dry blasts of certain flowers heavy in bloom. The shock of a new scent as you passed, could well be something in that he could tease out for a sonnet or a roundel.

He stuck the spade down again, another clump of soil displaced. It wasn’t just the trellis that’d need to get down far below. Unless he moved fast, he wouldn’t get any blossoms from what he’d be planting this calendar year, and he’d have to wait until 2071 to get a decent crop of jasmine flowers.

On the other side of the garden, the loquats and plums were coming in nicely; they’d be ripe in a few weeks. Buffy was especially looking forward to the Mirabelles and the Greengages, and he personally couldn’t wait for the Wicksons and Elephant Hearts. Most of Buffy’s friends, too; she’d always send guests off with small, fully laden baskets as parting gifts. They were always surprised at how he could manage to coax so much fruit out of trees not quite suited to the climate, and Spike took their compliments in stride. Of course he could manage it. There wasn’t much he couldn’t grow. Vampires and soil: it was a very intimate relationship.

Most humans didn’t stop to think about the connection between vampires and soil. The ones that did, tended not to dwell on the far-reaching implications. Even when they benefitted directly from it, like the baskets of edible sunshine or having vampires look after their homes when they were gone.

At the rate the clean-up was going, it’d be another three and a half years, down from the early estimates of six – thereabouts, anyway. The city of Berkeley and surrounding environs wouldn’t be fully cleared and made safe for non-vampires to live in any time before that. Many hands making for light work and all that. It’d started with the initial Angel Island crew, but word spread fast, and it didn’t even take a fortnight before more vampires arrived. They came up north, down south, out west, making their way from all over the country, as far afield as Halifax, even, lining up for daysuits and nighttime gear and shift assignments and personal invitations from people that didn’t want their goldfish to starve while they were away.

Maybe it was the goldfish that did it. Goldfish, lizards, household plants, all manner of living things that hadn’t been taken with their owners in the initial rushed evacuation and couldn’t look after themselves as the escaped parrots were managing. If people were entrusting vampires with looking after their homes and houses and dear companion creatures, maybe vampires could be trusted to at least be somewhat trustworthy. Not just wild creatures anymore. They weren’t yet at the level of citizens, but were inching on towards productive members of society.

Vargas had come out victorious. She’d wanted a way for vampires to be seen as people and tried to change the world to see that come to pass. Now here they all were, because of what she’d done, and she’d gotten her wish at long last. Most people didn’t get that much in their lives. Not even the roundabout, backwards way she’d managed. Good on her for living to see her dreams through. It about killed him all over again and made him toss a spadeful of dirt over his shoulder and out over the treetops and into the fields beyond the garden. 

Drusilla had come out victorious, too. In her way. Her final triumph over the one who’d broken her – the whammy she’d put on Angel to force him to consent to the curse holding steady enough that Angelus wouldn’t ever be returning. He’d sired her, and she’d rid the world of him forever. Fitting, that.

The first couple of months, Spike had pitched in with the cleanup, back when they’d needed as many hands as could be spared. A week on, a week off, same as the rest and for enough time to make the drive worthwhile. Angel, too, and Buffy hadn’t asked about that – wouldn’t ask about it, leaving it a vampire-to-vampire topic, and it made his heart nearly beat in gratitude. Buffy knew the limits of her understanding, and how much he and Angel couldn’t tell her. She’d long ago made peace with that.

It hadn’t even taken four months for there to be enough volunteers to make Gerhard smile. Four months for enough vampires so Spike and Angel didn’t have to lend their hands to intricate rituals to spin reality out of spare threads of probability. There’d arrived enough vespertine workers that he could go back to modeling for art classes if he wanted.

He’d start up again the coming fall when the new semester began. Easier to wrangle a payment agreement that way – close as vampires were getting to being seen as people, they still didn’t have the necessary legal standing to qualify. Contracting out to wildlife, however complete its capacity for consent, was always tricky.

No one involved in Vargas’s mad crusade had gotten any punishment for what they did to the vampires. There wasn’t even a slap on the wrist for some drummed-up petty offense regarding illegal transportation of animals. What they did get charged with were for illegal use of state-owned resources, squatting, reckless endangerment, involuntary manslaughter. Vargas got eighteen years and most of the rest got away with fifteen, all of them minimum security, all of them with a chance for parole – not that there was anything waiting for them once they got out, their names and reputations burned, forbidden from officially practicing magic for the rest of their natural human lives. That’s what got them their punishment. Not for torturing vampires. Not that part.

Spike stuck the spade into the hole, now nearly deep enough for his liking, and leaned back against the metal shaft to watch the edges of the sky as night crept in. Someone had posted drone footage of Berkeley the other day. It was an eerie sight, made all the stranger by how neatly everything was being kept. Other empty cities got taken over by nature. Berkeley was still manicured and cared for, giving the impression everyone had just stepped out, all of them at once, and would be back first thing tomorrow morning. They’d posted some evening footage, too, a live feed going up to the point the drone flew into an airborne pocket of random chance and by all eyewitness accounts, flew out a long-extinct tropical bird.

It was probably at Telegraph Hill already, bunking down with the conures. There’d be some human-interest story about it in a day or two. There usually were, for things like that. He hadn’t set up a newsfeed for those sorts of happenings yet; with Buffy still getting CC’d on the reports, he didn’t need to. Reading over her shoulder was enough.

Spike hadn’t deleted his other news feeds. Not that there’d ever be anything worthwhile posted on them ever again. That wasn’t the point. He wasn’t going to go checking them for updates anymore. Though if he wanted to, he couldn’t just open up the reader: he’d have to go into the account settings, toggle the right button, then go back and check the sub-folder where he’d set up the news feeds to come out.

He hadn’t gotten rid of the photos, either. None of the selfies Dru had taken, so enamored with the instantaneous technology; none of the pictures she’d taken of the two of them together, making the most of a hellish situation. None of the pictures he’d taken of her. He’d moved them off his phone and set them up in a little hidden folder buried deep in his personal files – even if he went searching for them, unless he went to the trouble of un-hiding everything, they wouldn’t come up. 

It might be worth it to get them printed out by a professional sometime. Stick them in a safe-deposit box. There was something nicely tactile about a picture that could be held and looked at, really _looked_ at, letting the eyes linger on different parts and aspects and really let you get to know the image. Really understand the shape of everything there. Not an experience that could happen with a screen, no matter the device.

Spike took in a deep breath, rummaged in his pockets to get out the papers and tobacco to roll himself a cigarette, then stopped and took a more careful sniff.

There weren’t any fences this part of the property. They were too far out from town to need them here. Ways to mark the boundary, yes, vampires_ knew_ boundaries, but not fences.

He turned around and held himself still, as not to scare it off.

The coyote stared right back.

Wasn’t as though they didn’t come around here. Wasn’t as though he didn’t hear them, some nights, calling out to one another. Just that the wild things didn’t come here, to his gardens. Vampires knew boundaries and wild animals knew when there was something bigger, stronger, faster, more dangerous than them. He’d seen to that, around here. He might be tamed but he was still a wild creature in the ways that mattered.

The coyote wasn’t a big, old, clever one that thought it might sneak away. Neither was it a young one without any fear or knowledge of the order of things. It looked big enough to be about a year old, well past puppyhood and heading into the adult part of its life. And its eyes were locked onto his own. A long stare he didn’t often see from them – fixed, rapt attention. Spike shifted into game face and bared his fangs, and it drew back but didn’t run off whimpering as every coyote before it had always done. He slid his fangs away, and it kept watching him.

It padded closer.

Not close enough to pet. Not close enough to touch. Close enough to smell there wasn’t any fear coming off it. Close enough to see into its eyes in the rustling twilight with the day quickly fading out, its beautiful, unafraid eyes.

It looked at him knowingly, beyond that of one wild creature to another. As one_ person_ to another.

It blinked, then turned and walked away.

Spike watched it go, heard it run, waited until it was nearly gone before he called out to it. Pitching his throat and casting his voice upwards, his California magpie call, not the peeps and not the chatter but the high, clapping call to let the world know he was here.

He heard it stop running. And out in the night, the coyote howled back.

Spike called out again and was rewarded with another howl.

He couldn’t know. Couldn’t be certain. There wasn’t any way to figure it, not without getting a grade six witch out here and invoking the right kinds of resonator spells and making sure they were all aligned with that which was gone from the world and hoping that he, Spike, all that was truly left of her and her great legacy to the world, was enough for them to be able to manage. It might well have been a wild animal miraculously unafraid of him and only called back because it was still one creature to another, or even just because his magpie call was that good. That’d happened before, a couple of times. No reason it couldn’t happen again. No reason to think anything more of it than that.

Or he could tell himself something that he’d never quite be certain about and let that satisfy him.

Spike smiled, thinking of the scent of jasmine flowers and the color of Drusilla’s eyes.

“As it suits you,” he whispered, the sound of the howl fading out into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks go to [Andtheyfightcrime](https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/andtheyfightcrime/profile), [OffYourBird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OffYourBird/pseuds/OffYourBird), [Petra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/profile), and [Sidewaystime](https://sidewaystime.tumblr.com/) for early and steady encouragement; to [Tinsnip](https://tinsnip.tumblr.com/) and [ZiGraves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZiGraves/profile) for holding me accountable; and to [KelasParmak](https://kelasparmak.tumblr.com/), [wolf_shadoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolf_shadoe), and [YellowB](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowb/pseuds/yellowb) for beta reading. My banner was made by [Pfeifferpack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pfeifferpack/pseuds/pfeifferpack), and my hat’s off to her. Tremendous thanks go out to [Niamh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niamh/pseuds/Niamh), who’s one of the biggest reasons this story is even here. Not only did she get me thinking about a sequel to Autumn’s Advancing and encouraged me to keep going in the ’verse, she was tremendously generous with her time once this was written, giving me a New York City publishing house’s editorial treatment. Unrelentingly harsh and fair in knowing what needed to be changed and relentlessly kind in telling me so, this story wouldn’t be nearly as good without her.
> 
> -
> 
> At the Morgan Library's exhibition of JRR Tolkien's papers, illustrations, and assorted ephemera, there was a small section on his correspondences, which included this piece from Joni Mitchell. Yes, that Joni Mitchell. She was in regular contact with him for a short period of time, and as thanks for allowing her to use some of his characters to name her recording company, she sent him an early version of the lyrics of "I Think I Understand."
> 
> I didn't take this picture at the exhibition, not wanting to get kicked out before I saw everything. I waited until my library hold on the book _Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth_ came through, and I could take a snapshot and finally share it firsthand.
> 
> [ ](https://imgur.com/E90ZNyQ)
> 
> Transcript:
> 
> _Daylight shatters on the path  
The forest's far behind  
Today I am not prey to dark uncertainty  
The Shadow trembles in its wrath  
I've robbed its darkness blind  
And tasted sunlight as my fear came clear to me_
> 
> _I think I understand  
Fear is like a Wilderland *  
Stepping stones or sinking sand_
> 
> _Now the way leads to the hill  
Above the steeple's chime  
Below me sleepy rooftops 'round the harbor  
It's there I'll drink my thirsty fill  
Of friendship over wine  
Forgetting fear, but never disregarding her_
> 
> _I think I understand  
Fear is like a Wilderland  
Stepping stones or sinking sand_
> 
> _Sometimes shadows in the night/will call me back again_
> 
> _Back along the pathway of a troubled mind  
Where forests rise to block the light  
That keeps a traveler sane  
I'll challenge them with flashes from a brighter time_
> 
> _I think I understand  
Fear is like a Wilderland  
Stepping stones or sinking sand_
> 
> _Stranger, take my helping hand_
> 
> _* Joni says she was working with "wilderness," but needed the rhyme, and found wilderland in her head. She hadn't read the trilogy then, and I don't think I mentioned the word to her, so I think it was a happy accident._


End file.
